Unsupervised tweets categorization using semantic and statistical features

Clustering is one of the widely used techniques in information retrieval. This experiment intends to categorize Tweets (based on their content) as representative of social media/user-generated content by exploiting statistical and semantic features. tf-idf, being widespread, is employed in combination with a synonym-based weighting scheme. The output of tf-idf in the form of the weight vector is transferred to the next phase as input, where based on the word synonyms, the system generate another weighted vector. Both vectors are used as a feature for clustering. The synonym-based feature technique adds semantic importance to the formation of the clusters. Using a density-based categorical clustering algorithm (with 8 as minpoints and 1.5 as epsilon), we categorized the Tweets into clusters. Six clusters are formed from 1K Tweets, which are evaluated manually and found cohesive. The Silhouette coefficient score (0.47) is used to validate the clusters.