Improving Text Stream Clustering using Term Burstiness and Co-burstiness
Argyris Kalogeratos, Panagiotis Zagorisios, Aristidis C. Likas · 2016
In text streams, documents appear over time and their times-tamps can be used to improve typical approaches for text representation and clustering. A way to exploit temporal information is through the detection of bursty terms in such streams, i.e. terms that appear in many documents during short time period. Research efforts so far have shown that utilizing the burst information in the text representation can improve the performance of text clustering algorithms. However, most attempts take into account the bursty terms individually, without investigating the relation between them. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that most of the important documents of a topic are published during the period in which the 'main' topic terms are bursty. Therefore, we focus on both term burstiness and co-burstiness by determining groups of terms that are simultaneously bursty at a time period and also co-occurring in the same documents. Next, the documents that contain co-bursty terms from those groups, are considered as important for the respective topics and are used to construct robust synthetic prototypes following an agglomerative process. These prototypes are finally used to initialize in a deterministic fashion the spherical k-means clustering algorithm. Experimental results validate empirically the quality of the solutions provided by the proposed approach which seems to efficiently overcome the initialization problem of spherical k-means.