Discovery of hierarchical thematic structure in text collections with adaptive resonance theory

This paper investigates the abilities of adaptive resonance theory (ART) neural networks as miners of hierarchical thematic structure in text collections. We present experimental results with binary ART1 on the benchmark Reuter-21578 corpus. Using both quantitative evaluation with the standard F ₁ measure and qualitative visualization of the hierarchy obtained with ART, we discuss how useful ART built hierarchies would be to a user intending to use it as a means to find and access textual information. Our F ₁ results show that ART1 produces hierarchical clustering that exhibit a quality exceeding k-means and a hierarchical clustering algorithm. However, we identify several critical problem areas that would make it rather impractical to actually use such a hierarchy in a real-life environment. These predicaments point to the importance of semantic feature selection. Our main contribution is to test in details the applicability of ART to the important domain of hierarchical document clustering, an application of Adaptive Resonance that had received little attention until now.

Louis MasseyEmail: