A hierarchical monothetic document clustering algorithm for summarization and browsing search results

Organizing Web search results into a hierarchy of topics and subtopics facilitates browsing the collection and locating results of interest. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical monothetic clustering algorithm to build a topic hierarchy for a collection of search results retrieved in response to a query. At every level of the hierarchy, the new algorithm progressively identifies topics in a way that maximizes the coverage while maintaining distinctiveness of the topics. We refer the proposed algorithm to as DisCover. Evaluating the quality of a topic hierarchy is a non-trivial task, the ultimate test being user judgment. We use several objective measures such as coverage and reach time for an empirical comparison of the proposed algorithm with two other monothetic clustering algorithms to demonstrate its superiority. Even though our algorithm is slightly more computationally intensive than one of the algorithms, it generates better hierarchies. Our user studies also show that ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Krishna Kummamuru, Rohit Lotlikar, Shourya Roy, Karan Singal, Raghu Krishnapuram
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Monothetic Clustering Algorithm, Monothetic Clustering Algorithms, Topic Hierarchy, WWW 2004