Re^3: Cluster a big bunch of strings

citromatik,
You really didn't answer my last question which means I probably didn't ask it well. Is your goal only to identify duplicate articles (typos and what not) or is it to group related articles as well? If it is to group related articles, what criterion are you using. I gave an example relating to social network sites. A "loose" group might be anything having to do with a social networking site where a "tighter" group might only have to do with lawsuits against Facebook.

What do you intend to do if an article can belong to more than one cluster? You mentioned that it would be considered a bug if an article ended up in the wrong cluster - how would you know? Is there a subjective element to this task or can you define the criterion for clustering in black and white terms. In other words, if randomly selected 1000 articles and were to cluster them by hand - could you write code that would produce the same results (where computational time is not a factor)?

Cheers - L~R

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Re^4: Cluster a big bunch of strings by citromatik (Curate) on Apr 01, 2009 at 08:42 UTC
You really didn't answer my last question which means I probably didn't ask it well. Ok, sorry for the misunderstanding Is your goal only to identify duplicate articles (typos and what not) or is it to group related articles as well? No, it is just to group together articles with the same title (allowing misspellings). What do you intend to do if an article can belong to more than one cluster? It should be very improbable a typo that "converts" a title into another one (i.e. different article titles should have an edit distance greater than 5). Nevertheless I can imagine cases where this is not true (for example: `Blah, blah, blah typeI` VS `Same Blah, blah, blah typeII`. It will be very difficult to differentiate such cases (not solved yet). Is there a subjective element to this task or can you define the criterion for clustering in black and white terms. In other words, if randomly selected 1000 articles and were to cluster them by hand - could you write code that would produce the same results (where computational time is not a factor)? Probably there will be errors in the computational approach that can be ironed out by manual inspection. However, a reasonable small amount of errors will not degrade the final result. I hope I answered your doubts. Thanks in advance citromatik	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^5: Cluster a big bunch of strings by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Apr 01, 2009 at 15:56 UTC
citromatik, Ok, this now sounds more feasible. I would take a multi-phase approach with multiple passes. I use "phase" to mean logical unit of work and I use "pass" to mean processing the same title another time. Read more... (4 kB) I am soliciting comments and feedback in the CB so there may be significant updates. I will annotate any as appropriate. Cheers - L~R	[reply]