Exploration of a Text Collection and Identification of Topics by Clustering

摘要

An application of cluster analysis to identify topics in a collection of posters abstracts from the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Annual Meeting in 2006 is presented. The topics were identified by selecting from the abstracts belonging to each cluster the terms with the highest scores using different ranking schemes. The ranking scheme based on log-entropy showed better performance in this task than other more classical TFIDF schemes. An evaluation of the extracted topics was performed by comparison with previously defined thematic categories for which titles are available, and after assigning each cluster to one dominant category. The results show that repeated bisecting k-means performs better than standard k-means.