Evaluating Hierarchical Clustering of Search Results

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Evaluating Hierarchical Clustering of Search
Results
SPIRE 2005, Buenos Aires

• Departamento de Lenguajes y
• Sistemas Informáticos
• UNED, Spain
• Juan Cigarrán
• Anselmo Peñas
• Julio Gonzalo
• Felisa Verdejo
• nlp.uned.es

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Overview

• Scenario
• Assumptions
• Features of a Good Hierarchical Clustering
• Evaluation Measures
• Minimal Browsing Area (MBA)
• Distillation Factor (DF)
• Hierarchy Quality (HQ)
• Conclusion

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Scenario

• Complex information needs
• Compile information from different sources
• Inspect the whole list of documents
• More than 100 documents
• Help to
• Find the relevant topics
• Discriminate from unrrelevant documents
• Approach
• Hierarchical Clustering Formal Concept Analysis

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Problem

• How to define and measure the quality of a
  hierarchical clustering?
• How to compare different clustering approaches?

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Previous assumptions

• Each cluster contains only those documents fully
  described by its descriptors

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Previous assumptions

• Open world perspective

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Good Hierarchical Clustering

• The content of the clusters.
• Clusters should not mix relevant with non
  relevant information

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Good Hierarchical Clustering

• The hierarchical arrangement of the clusters
• Relevant information should be in the same path

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Good Hierarchical Clustering

• The number of clusters
• Number of clusters substantially lower than the
  number of documents
• How clusters are described
• Cognitive load of reading a cluster description
• Ability to predict the relevance of the
  information that it contains (not addressed here)

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Evaluation Measures

• Criterion
• Minimize the browsing effort for finding ALL
  relevant information
• Baseline
• The original document list returned by a search
  engine

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Evaluation Measures

• Consider
• Content of clusters
• Hierarchical arrangement of clusters
• Size of the hierarchy
• Cognitive load of reading a document (in the
  baseline) Kd
• Cognitive load of reading a node descriptor (in
  the hierarchy) Kn
• Requirement
• Relevance assessments are available

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Minimal Browsing Area (MBA)

• The minimal set of nodes the user has to traverse
  to find ALL the relevant documents minimising the
  number of irrelevant ones

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Distillation Factor (DF)

• Ability to isolate relevant information compared
  with the original document list (Gain
  Factor, DFgt1)

• Equivalent to

• Considers only the cognitive load of reading
  documents

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Distillation Factor (DF)

• Example

Precision 4/7
Precision MBA 4/5
DF(L) 7/5 1.4
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Distillation Factor (DF)

• Counterexample

• Bad clustering with good DF
• Extend the DF measure considering the cognitive
  cost of taking browsing decisions ? HQ

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Hierarchy Quality (HQ)

• Assumption
• When a node (in the MBA) is explored, all its
  lower neighbours have to be considered some will
  be in turn explored, some will be discarded
• Nview subset of lower neighbours of each node
  belonging to the MBA

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Hierarchy Quality (HQ)

• Kn and Kd are directly related with the retrieval
  scenario in which the experiments take place
• The researcher must tune KKn/Kd before
  conducting the experiment
• HQ gt 1 indicates an improvement of the clustering
  versus the original list

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Hierarchy Quality (HQ)

• Example

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Conclusions and Future Work

• Framework for comparing different clustering
  approaches taking into account
• Content of clusters
• Hierarchical arrangement of clusters
• Cognitive load to read document and node
  descriptions
• Adaptable to the retrieval scenario in which
  experiments take place
• Future work
• Conduct user studies to compare their results
  with the automatic evaluation
• Results will reflect the quality of the
  descriptors
• Will be used to fine-tune the kd and kn parameters

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• Thank you!