Hypertext and XML Data Structures Hidden Markov Models
6.4 Hierarchy of Clusters
Hierarchical clustering in Information Retrieval focuses on the area of hierarchical agglomerative clustering methods (HACM) (Willet-88). The term agglomerative means the clustering process starts with unclustered items and performs pairwise similarity measures to determine the clusters. Divisive is the term applied to starting with a cluster and breaking it down into smaller clusters. The objectives of creating a hierarchy of clusters are to:
Reduce the overhead of search
Provide for a visual representation of the information space Expand the retrieval of relevant items.
Search overhead is reduced by performing top-down searches of the centroids of the clusters in the hierarchy and trimming those branches that are not relevant (discussed in greater depth in Chapter 7). It is difficult to create a visual display of the total item space. Use of dendograms along with visual cues on the size of clusters (e.g., size of the ellipse) and strengths of the linkages between clusters (e.g., dashed lines indicate reduced similarities) allows a user to determine alternate paths of browsing the database (see Figure 6.12). The dendogram allows the user to determine which clusters to be reviewed are likely to have items of interest. Even without the visual display of the hierarchy, a user can use the
Figure 6.12 Dendogram
logical hierarchy to browse items of interest. A user, once having identified an item of interest, can request to see other items in the cluster. The user can increase the specificity of items by going to children clusters or by increasing the generality of items being reviewed by going to a parent cluster.
Most of the existing HACM approaches can be defined in terms of the Lance-Williams dissimilarity update formula (Lance-66). It defines a general formula for calculating the dissimilarity D between any existing cluster and a new cluster created by combining clusters and
By proper selection of and the current techniques for HACM can be represented (Frakes-92). In comparing the various methods of creating hierarchical clusters Voorhees and later El-Hamdouchi and Willet determined that the group average method produced the best results on document collections (Voorhees-86, El-Hamdouchi-89).
The similarity between two clusters can be treated as the similarity between all objects in one cluster and all objects in the other cluster. Voorhees showed that the similarity between a cluster centroid and any item is equal to the mean similarity between the item and all items in the cluster. Since the centroid is the average of all items in the cluster, this means that similarities between centroids can be used to calculate the similarities between clusters.
Ward’s Method (Ward-63) chooses the minimum square Euclidean distance between points (e.g., centroids in this case) normalized by the number of objects in each cluster. He uses the formula for the variance I, choosing the minimum variance:
where is the number of objects in and is the squared Euclidean distance. The process of selection of centroids can be improved by using the reciprocal nearest neighbor algorithm (Murtaugh-83, Murtaugh-85).
The techniques discribed in Section 6.2 created independent sets of classes. The automatic clustering techniques can also be used to create a hierarchy of objects (items or terms). The automatic approach has been applied to creating item hierarchies more than in hierarchical statistical thesaurus generation. In the manual creation of thesauri, network relationships are frequently allowed between terms and classes creating an expanded thesaurus called semantic networks (e.g., in TOPIC and RetrievalWare). Hierarchies have also been created going from general categories to more specific classes of terms. The human creator ensures that the generalization or specification as the hierarchy is created makes semantic sense. Automatic creation of a hierarchy for a statistical thesaurus introduces too many errors to be productive.
But for item hierarchies the algorithms can also be applied. Centroids were used to reduce computation required for adjustments in term assignments to classes. For both terms and items, the centroid has the same structure as any of the items or terms when viewed as a vector from the Item/Term matrix (see Figure 6.2). A term is a vector composed of a column whereas an item is a vector composed of a row. The Scatter/Gather system (Hearst-96) is an example of this technique. In the Scatter/Gather system an initial set of clusters was generated.
Each of these clusters was re-clustered to produce a second level. This process iterated until individual items were left at the lowest level.
When the creation of the classes is complete, a centroid can be calculated for each class. When there are a large number of classes, the next higher level in the hierarchy can be created by using the same algorithms used in the initial clustering to cluster the centroids. The only change required may be in the thresholds used. When this process is complete, if there are still too many of these higher level clusters, an additional iteration of clustering can be applied to their centroids. This process will continue until the desired number of clusters at the highest level is achieved.
A cluster can be represented by a category if the clusters were monolithic (membership is based upon a specific attribute). If the cluster is polythetic, generated by allowing for multiple attributes (e.g., words/concepts), then it can best be represented by using a list of the most significant words in the cluster. An alternative is to show a two or three-dimensional space where the clusters are represented by clusters of points. Monolithic clusters have two advantages over polythetic (Sanderson-99): how easy it is for a user to understand the topic of the cluster and the confidence that every item within the cluster will have a significant
focus on the topic. For example, YAHOO is a good example of a monolithic cluster environment.
Sanderson and Croft proposed the following methodology to building a concept hierarchy. Rather than just focusing the construction of the hierarchy, they looked at ways of extracting terms from the documents to represent the hierarchy. The terms had the following characteristics:
Terms had to best reflect the topics
A parent term would refer to a more general concept then its child
A child would cover a related subtopic of the parent
A directed acyclic graph would represent relationships versus a pure hierarchy.
Ambiguous terms would have separate entries in the hierarchy for each meaning.
As a concept hierarchy, it should be represented similar to WordNet (Miller-95) which uses synonyms, antonyms, hyponym/hypernym (is-a/is-a-type-of), and meronym/holonym (has-part/is-a-part-of). Some techniques for generating hierarchies are Grefenstette's use of the similarity of contexts for locating synonyms (Grefenstette-94), use of key phrases (e.g., "such as", "and other") as an indicator of hyponym/hypernym relationships (Hearst-98), use of head and modifier noun and verb phrases to determine hierarchies (Woods-97) and use of a cohesion statistic to measure the degree of association between terms (Forsyth-86).
Sanderson and Croft used a test based upon subsumption. It is defined given two terms X and Y, X subsumes Y if:
X subsumes Y if the documents which Y occurs in are almost (.8) a subset of the documents that X occurs in. The factor of .8 was heuristically used because an absolute condition was eliminating too many useful relationships. X is thus a parent of Y.
The set of documents to be clustered was determined by a query and the query terms were used as the initial set of terms for the monolithic cluster. This set was expanded by adding more terms via query expansion using peudorelevance feedback (Blind feedback, Local Context Analysis) which is described in Chapter 7. They then used the terms and the formula above to create the hierarchies.
6.5 Summary
Thesauri, semantic nets and item clusters are essential tools in Information Retrieval Systems, assisting the user in locating relevant items. They provide more benefit to the recall process than in improving precision. Thesauri, either humanly generated or statistical, and semantic nets are used to expand search statements, providing a mapping between the users vocabulary and that of the authors. The number of false hits on non-relevant items retrieved is determined by how tightly coupled the terms are in the classes. When automatic techniques are used to create a statistical thesaurus, techniques such as cliques produce classes where the items are more likely to be related to the same concept than any of the other approaches. When a manually created thesaurus is used, human intervention is required to eliminate homonyms that produce false hits. A homonym is when a term has multiple, different meanings (e.g., the term field meaning an area of grass or an electromagnetic field). The longer (more terms) in the search statement, the less important the human intervention to eliminate homonyms. This is because items identified by the wrong interpretation of the homonym should have a low weight because the other search terms are not likely to be found in the item. When search statements are short, significant decreases in precision will occur if homonym pruning is not applied.
Item clustering also assists the user in identifying relevant items. It is used in two ways: to directly find additional items that may not have been found by the query and to serve as a basis for visualization of the Hit file. Each item cluster has a common semantic basis containing similar terms and thus similar concepts. To assist the user in understanding the major topics resulting from a search, the items retrieved can be clustered and used to create a visual (e.g., graphical) representation of the clusters and their topics (see Chapter 8 for examples). This allows a user to navigate between topics, potentially showing topics the user had not considered. The topics are not defined by the query but by the text of the items retrieved.
When items in the database have been clustered, it is possible to retrieve all of the items in a cluster, even if they were not identified by the search statement. When the user retrieves a strongly relevant item, the user can look at other items like it without issuing another search. When relevant items are used to create a new query (i.e., relevance feedback discussed in Section 7.3), the retrieved hits are similar to what might be produced by a clustering algorithm. As with the term clustering, item clustering assists in mapping between a user’s vocabulary and the vocabulary of the authors.
From another perspective term clustering and item clustering achieve the same objective even though they are the inverse of each other. The objective of both is to determine additional relevant items by a co-ocurrence process. A statistical thesaurus creates a cluster of terms that co-occur in the same set of items. For all of the terms within the same cluster (assuming they are tightly coupled) there will be significant overlap of the set of items they are found in. Item clustering is based upon the same terms being found in the other items in the cluster. Thus the set of items that caused a term clustering has a strong possibility of being in the same item cluster based upon the terms. For example, if a term cluster has 10 terms in it (assuming they are tightly related), then there will be a set of items where each item contains major subsets of the terms. From the item perspective, the set of items that has the commonality of terms, has a strong possibility to be placed in the same item cluster.
Hierarchical clustering of items is of theoretical interest, but has minimal practical application. The major rationale for using hierarchical clustering is to improve performance in search of clusters. The complexity of maintaining the clusters as new items are added to the system and the possibility of reduced recall (discussed in Chapter 7) are examples of why this is not used in commercial systems. Hierarchical thesauri are used in operational systems because there is additional knowledge in the human generated hierarchy. They have been historically used as a means to select index terms when indexing items. It provides a controlled vocabulary and standards between indexers.
EXERCISES
1. If clustering has been completed on two different domains. Discuss the impact of merging the domains into a single cluster for both term clustering and item clustering. What factors will affect the amount of work that will be required to merge the clusters together? (HINT: consider the steps in clustering)
2. Which of the guidelines and additional decisions can be incorporated in an automatic statistical thesaurus construction program? Describe how they would be implemented and the risks with their implementation. Describe your justification for the guidelines and exercises selected that can not be automated.
3. Prove that a term could not be found in multiple clusters when using the single link technique.
4. Describe what effect increasing and decreasing the threshold value has on the creation of classes and under what condition you would make the change.
5. Given the following Term-Term matrix:
a. Determine the Term Relationship matrix using a threshold of 10 or higher
b. Determine the clusters using the clique technique
c. Determine the clusters using the single link technique
d. Determine the clusters using the star technique where the term selected for the new seed for the next star is the smallest number term nor already part of a class.
e. Discuss the differences between the single link, the clique and the star clusters. What are the characteristics of the items that would suggest which technique to use?
a. Starting with Item 1 and Item 2 in Class 1, and with Item 3 and Item 4 in Class 2, determine which items should be assigned to the clusters.
b. Use the one-pass technique to determine cluster assignment,
c. What are the differences in the results from the two processes?
7. Will the clustering process always come to the same final set of clusters no matter what the starting clusters? Explain your answer.
8. Can statistical thesaurus generation be used to develop a hierarchical cluster representation of a set of items? Discuss the value of creating the hierarchy and how you would use it in a system.
9. What is the effect of clustering techniques on reducing the user overhead of finding relevant items.