Document clustering with prior knowledge

Document clustering is an important tool for text analysis and is used in many different applications. We propose to incorporate prior knowledge of cluster membership for document cluster analysis and develop a novel semi-supervised document clustering model. The method models a set of documents with weighted graph in which each document is represented as a vertex, and each edge connecting a pair of vertices is weighted with the similarity value of the two corresponding documents. The prior knowledge indicates pairs of documents that known to belong to the same cluster. Then, the prior knowledge is transformed into a set of constraints. The document clustering task is accomplished by finding the best cuts of the graph under the constraints. We apply the model to the Normalized Cut method to demonstrate the idea and concept. Our experimental evaluations show that the proposed document clustering model reveals remarkable performance improvements with very limited training samples, and hence is a very effective semi-supervised classification tool.