Enhanced clustering models with wiki-based k-nearest neighbors-based representation for web search result clustering

Abstract

Information retrieval is a difficult process due to the overabundance of information on the web. Nowadays, search result responds to user queries with too many results although only a few are relevant. Therefore, the existing clustering methods that fail in clustering snippets (short texts) of web documents due to the low frequencies of document terms should be deeply investigated. One of the approaches that can be used to solve this problem is the expansion of document terms with semantically similar terms. Hence, a list of terms with their closest and accurate semantically similar words (word representation) must be built. This study aims to design and develop a new framework to enhance the performance of web search result clustering (WSRC). The research also presents a new unsupervised distributed word representation scheme where each word is represented by a vector of its semantically related words; such as scheme expands snippets and user queries. The proposed framework consists of several activities, such as (1) various standard datasets (Open Directory Project [ODP]-239 and MORESQUE) that are used for evaluating search result clustering algorithms for most cited dataset works, (2) text pre-processing, (3) document representation based on a new wiki-based k-nearest neighbors (KNN) representation method, (4) effect of the proposed model on the performance of traditional clustering methods (k-means, k-medoids, single-linkage, and complete-linkage) for WSRC, and (5) evaluation stage of the proposed method. Results indicate that enhanced clustering methods, according to the new wiki-KNN based representation method in comparison with the baseline methods, show a significant improvement in WSRC. Furthermore, the new data representation scheme has enhanced the overall performance of clustering methods.