A Semantics-Based Clustering Approach for Online Laboratories Using K-Means and HAC Algorithms

Abstract

Due to the availability of a vast amount of unstructured data in various forms (e.g., the web, social networks, etc.), the clustering of text documents has become increasingly important. Traditional clustering algorithms have not been able to solve this problem because the semantic relationships between words could not accurately represent the meaning of the documents. Thus, semantic document clustering has been extensively utilized to enhance the quality of text clustering. This method is called unsupervised learning and it involves grouping documents based on their meaning, not on common keywords. This paper introduces a new method that groups documents from online laboratory repositories based on the semantic similarity approach. In this work, the dataset is collected first by crawling the short real-time descriptions of the online laboratories’ repositories from the Web. A vector space is created using frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and clustering is done using the K-Means and Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) algorithms with different linkages. Three scenarios are considered: without preprocessing (WoPP); preprocessing with steaming (PPwS); and preprocessing without steaming (PPWoS). Several metrics have been used for evaluating experiments: Silhouette average, purity, V-measure, F1-measure, accuracy score, homogeneity score, completeness and NMI score (consisting of five datasets: online labs, 20 NewsGroups, Txt_sentoken, NLTK_Brown and NLTK_Reuters). Finally, by creating an interactive webpage, the results of the proposed work are contrasted and visualized.