Semantic string operation for specializing AHC algorithm for text clustering

Abstract

This article proposes the modified AHC (Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering) algorithm which clusters string vectors, instead of numerical vectors, as the approach to the text clustering. The results from applying the string vector based algorithms to the text clustering were successful in previous works and synergy effect between the text clustering and the word clustering is expected by combining them with each other; the two facts become motivations for this research. In this research, we define the operation on string vectors called semantic similarity, and modify the AHC algorithm by adopting the proposed similarity metric as the approach to the text clustering. The proposed AHC algorithm is empirically validated as the better approach in clustering texts in news articles and opinions. We need to define and characterize mathematically more operations on string vectors for modifying more advanced machine learning algorithms.