Document Similarity Using a Phrase Indexing Graph Model

Document clustering techniques mostly rely on single term analysis of text, such as the vector space model. To better capture the structure of documents, the underlying data model should be able to represent the phrases in the document as well as single terms. We present a novel data model, the Document Index Graph, which indexes Web documents based on phrases rather than on single terms only. The semistructured Web documents help in identifying potential phrases that when matched with other documents indicate strong similarity between the documents. The Document Index Graph captures this information, and finding significant matching phrases between documents becomes easy and efficient with such model. The model is flexible in that it could revert to a compact representation of the vector space model if we choose not to index phrases. However, using phrase indexing yields more accurate document similarity calculations. The similarity between documents is based on both single term weights and matching phrase weights. The combined similarities are used with standard document clustering techniques to test their effect on the clustering quality. Experimental results show that our phrase-based similarity, combined with single-term similarity measures, gives a more accurate measure of document similarity and thus significantly enhances Web document clustering quality.