arXiv:2511.19350cs.LGcs.CL2025-11

提出可自动确定聚类数的高效谱方法,解决短文本聚类难题。

Scalable Parameter-Light Spectral Method for Clustering Short Text Embeddings with a Cohesion-Based Evaluation Metric

  • 基于拉普拉斯特征谱结构自动估计聚类数,结合自适应采样提升效率。
  • 在6个数据集上,新方法使K-Means等算法性能超越HDBSCAN等主流轻量方法。
  • 提出可解释的凝聚力比指标,无需真实标签即可有效评估聚类质量。

短文本嵌入聚类是自然语言处理中的基础任务,但因需预先指定聚类数量而面临挑战。本文提出一种可扩展的谱方法,通过余弦相似性构建拉普拉斯矩阵,并利用自适应采样策略从特征谱结构中直接估计聚类数,实现大规模数据下的高效可靠计算。为支持无真实标签的内在评估,提出凝聚力比(Cohesion Ratio)这一简单可解释的度量,其信息论动机源于互信息,在实验中与归一化互信息和同质性等外部指标高度相关。在六个短文本数据集及四种现代嵌入模型上的大量实验表明,当标准算法如K-Means和层次聚类结合本方法时,显著优于HDBSCAN、OPTICS和Leiden等流行轻量级方法。结果验证了该谱估计器与凝聚力比在无监督短文本组织与评估中的实际价值。代码与实验复现工具已公开于https://anonymous.4open.science/r/towards_clustering-0C2E。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Clustering short text embeddings is a foundational task in natural language processing, yet remains challenging due to the need to specify the number of clusters in advance. We introduce a scalable spectral method that estimates the number of clusters directly from the structure of the Laplacian eigenspectrum, constructed using cosine similarities and guided by an adaptive sampling strategy. This sampling approach enables our estimator to efficiently scale to large datasets without sacrificing reliability. To support intrinsic evaluation of cluster quality without ground-truth labels, we propose the Cohesion Ratio, a simple and interpretable evaluation metric that quantifies how much intra-cluster similarity exceeds the global similarity background. It has an information-theoretic motivation inspired by mutual information, and in our experiments it correlates closely with extrinsic measures such as normalized mutual information and homogeneity. Extensive experiments on six short-text datasets and four modern embedding models show that standard algorithms like K-Means and HAC, when guided by our estimator, significantly outperform popular parameter-light methods such as HDBSCAN, OPTICS, and Leiden. These results demonstrate the practical value of our spectral estimator and Cohesion Ratio for unsupervised organization and evaluation of short text data. Implementation of our estimator of k and Cohesion Ratio, along with code for reproducing the experiments, is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/towards_clustering-0C2E.

聚类短文本谱方法无监督

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