Building term hierarchies using graph-based clustering

Classical tasks of a librarian, such as screening and categorizing new documents based on their content, are increasingly replaced by search engines or through the use of cataloging software. A first overview of a corpus topical orientation can be achieved by combining graph-based search engines and clustering methods. Existing classical clustering methods, however, often require an a priori specification of the desired number of clusters to be output and do not consider term relationships in graphs, which is deficient from a practical point of view. Therefore, fully unsupervised graph-based clustering approaches at the term level offer new possibilities that mitigate these shortcomings. Within this work, a set of novel graph-based clustering algorithms have been developed. The hierarchical clustering algorithm (HCA) forms term hierarchies by iteratively isolating nodes of a given co-occurrence graph based on the evaluation of the edge weight between the nodes. Based on the co-occurrence graph inherent relationships of terms, a new graph is built agglomerative forming individual term clusters of related terms. The feasibility of the outlined methods for text analysis is shown.