Hyperbolic Self-Organizing Maps for Semantic Navigation

We introduce a new type of Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to navigate in the Semantic Space of large text collections. We propose a "hyperbolic SOM" (HSOM) based on a regular tesselation of the hyperbolic plane, which is a non-euclidean space characterized by constant negative gaussian curvature. The exponentially increasing size of a neighborhood around a point in hyperbolic space provides more freedom to map the complex information space arising from language into spatial relations. We describe experiments, showing that the HSOM can successfully be applied to text categorization tasks and yields results comparable to other state-of-the-art methods.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: Jörg Ontrup, Helge Ritter
• Keywords: Hyperbolic Som, Hyperbolic Space, Negative Gaussian Curvature, NIPS 2001, NIPS 2007