EGC: A novel event-oriented graph clustering framework for social media text

Abstract

With the popularity of social platforms such as Sina Weibo, Tweet, etc., a large number of public events spread rapidly on social networks and huge amount of textual data are generated along with the discussion of netizens. Social text clustering has become one of the most critical methods to help people find relevant information and provides quality data for subsequent timely public opinion analysis. Most existing neural clustering methods rely on manual labeling of training sets and take a long time in the learning process. Due to the explosiveness and the large-scale of social media data, it is a challenge for social text data clustering to satisfy the timeliness demand of users. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised event-oriented graph clustering framework (EGC), which can achieve efficient clustering performance on large-scale datasets with less time overhead and does not require any labeled data. Specifically, EGC first mines the potential relations existing in social text data and transforms the textual data of social media into an event-oriented graph by taking advantage of graph structure for complex relations representation. Secondly, EGC uses a keyword-based local importance method to accurately measure the weights of relations in event-oriented graph. Finally, a bidirectional depth-first clustering algorithm based on the interrelations is proposed to cluster the nodes in event-oriented graph. By projecting the relations of the graph into a smaller domain, EGC achieves fast convergence. The experimental results show that the clustering performance of EGC on the Weibo dataset reaches 0.926 (NMI), 0.926 (AMI), 0.866 (ARI), which are 13%–30% higher than other clustering methods. In addition, the average query time of EGC clustered data is 16.7ms, which is 90% less than the original data.