Semantic smoothing for model-based document clustering

A document is often full of class-independent "general" words and short of class-specific "core" words, which leads to the difficulty of document clustering. We argue that both problems will be relieved after suitable smoothing of document models in agglomerative approaches and of cluster models in partitional approaches, and hence improve clustering quality. To the best of our knowledge, most model-based clustering approaches use Laplacian smoothing to prevent zero probability while most similarity-based approaches employ the heuristic TF*IDF scheme to discount the effect of "general" words. Inspired by a series of statistical translation language model for text retrieval, we propose in this paper a novel smoothing method referred to as context-sensitive semantic smoothing for document clustering purpose. The comparative experiment on three datasets shows that model-based clustering approaches with semantic smoothing is effective in improving cluster quality.