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Cluster Hierarchies, Aggregates, and Exceptions

Researchers have suggested using the vector space model to organize a hypertext collection into clustered hierarchies [Crouch et al., 1989]. In this model, the content of each node or document is represented by a set of possibly weighted terms. Thus, each document can be represented by a term vector and the complete document collection can be represented by a vector space whose dimension is equal to the number of distinct terms to identify the documents in the collection. Similar or related documents are represented by similar multi-dimensional term vectors. Such a model facilitates clustering documents based on their similarity and ranking retrieved documents in decreasing order of their similarity to the query vector. Hence, the user can readily focus the search on those clusters that are likely to contain documents which are similar to the query. Comparisons are generally made between the query vector and the document vectors using one of the standard measures of similarity. Clustering is also helpful in locating neighboring nodes which discuss related topic(s). The user can incrementally refine the query vector to retrieve the desired document(s). An interactive browser incorporating the cluster hierarchy model was implemented by Crouch et al., on a Macintosh connected to a SUN network running the SMART Information Retrieval system. This interactive browser yielded a significant improvement over automatic cluster searches.