WordNet improves text document clustering

Text document clustering plays an important role in providing intuitive navigation and browsing mechanisms by organizing large amounts of information into a small number of meaningful clusters. The bag of words representation used for these clustering methods is often unsatisfactory as it ignores relationships between important terms that do not co-occur literally. In order to deal with the problem, we integrate background knowledge — in our application Wordnet — into the process of clustering text documents. We cluster the documents by a standard partitional algorithm. Our experimental evaluation on Reuters newsfeeds compares clustering results with pre-categorizations of news. In the experiments, improvements of results by background knowledge compared to the baseline can be shown for many interesting tasks.