Clustering tagged documents with labeled and unlabeled documents

This study employs our proposed semi-supervised clustering method called Constrained-PLSA to cluster tagged documents with a small amount of labeled documents and uses two data sets for system performance evaluations. The first data set is a document set whose boundaries among the clusters are not clear; while the second one has clear boundaries among clusters. This study employs abstracts of papers and the tags annotated by users to cluster documents. Four combinations of tags and words are used for feature representations. The experimental results indicate that almost all of the methods can benefit from tags. However, unsupervised learning methods fail to function properly in the data set with noisy information, but Constrained-PLSA functions properly. In many real applications, background knowledge is ready, making it appropriate to employ background knowledge in the clustering process to make the learning more fast and effective. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.