Improving Text Clustering with Social Tagging

Abstract

In this paper we study the use of social bookmarking to improve the quality of text clustering. Recently constrained clustering algorithms have been presented as a successful tool to introduce domain knowledge in the clustering process. This paper uses the tags saved by the users of Delicious to generate non artificial constraints for constrained clustering algorithms. The study demonstrates that it is possible to achieve a high percentage of good constraints with this simple approach and, more importantly, the evaluation shows that the use of these constraints produces a great improvement (up to 91.25%) of the clustering algorithms effectiveness.