Genetic algorithm for text clustering using ontology and evaluating the validity of various semantic similarity measures

This paper proposes a self-organized genetic algorithm for text clustering based on ontology method. The common problem in the fields of text clustering is that the document is represented as a bag of words, while the conceptual similarity is ignored. We take advantage of thesaurus-based and corpus-based ontology to overcome this problem. However, the traditional corpus-based method is rather difficult to tackle. A transformed latent semantic indexing (LSI) model which can appropriately capture the associated semantic similarity is proposed and demonstrated as corpus-based ontology in this article. To investigate how ontology methods could be used effectively in text clustering, two hybrid strategies using various similarity measures are implemented. Experiments results show that our method of genetic algorithm in conjunction with the ontology strategy, the combination of the transformed LSI-based measure with the thesaurus-based measure, apparently outperforms that with traditional similarity measures. Our clustering algorithm also efficiently enhances the performance in comparison with standard GA and k-means in the same similarity environments. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.