Seeded Hierarchical Clustering for Expert-Crafted Taxonomies
This addresses the need for practitioners in fields like political science to efficiently categorize large corpora with minimal labeled data, though it is incremental as it builds on existing clustering methods.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically fitting unlabeled data to expert-crafted taxonomies using only a small set of labeled examples, and the result was that their proposed HierSeed algorithm outperformed unsupervised and supervised baselines on three real-world datasets.
Practitioners from many disciplines (e.g., political science) use expert-crafted taxonomies to make sense of large, unlabeled corpora. In this work, we study Seeded Hierarchical Clustering (SHC): the task of automatically fitting unlabeled data to such taxonomies using only a small set of labeled examples. We propose HierSeed, a novel weakly supervised algorithm for this task that uses only a small set of labeled seed examples. It is both data and computationally efficient. HierSeed assigns documents to topics by weighing document density against topic hierarchical structure. It outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines for the SHC task on three real-world datasets.