Silhouette + attraction: A simple and effective method for text clustering†. (14th August 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: ERRECALDE, MARCELO L.; CAGNINA, LETICIA C.; ROSSO, PAOLO
• Is Part Of: Natural language engineering. Volume 22:Part 5(2016)
• Page Start: 687
• Page End: 726
• Publication Date: 2015-08-14
• Subjects: Natural language processing (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Software engineering -- Periodicals; 006.35
• DOI: 10.1017/S1351324915000273
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1351-3249

Abstract

Abstract: This article presents silhouette–attraction ( Sil–Att ), a simple and effective method for text clustering, which is based on two main concepts: the silhouette coefficient and the idea of attraction . The combination of both principles allows us to obtain a general technique that can be used either as a boosting method, which improves results of other clustering algorithms, or as an independent clustering algorithm. The experimental work shows that Sil–Att is able to obtain high-quality results on text corpora with very different characteristics. Furthermore, its stable performance on all the considered corpora is indicative that it is a very robust method. This is a very interesting positive aspect of Sil–Att with respect to the other algorithms used in the experiments, whose performances heavily depend on specific characteristics of the corpora being considered.