A co-occurrence based approach of automatic keyword expansion using mass diffusion

The performance of keyword expansion in prior methods is often enhanced by adopting external knowledge. Given a set of initial keywords, this paper is motivated to propose a novel method to expand semantically or conceptually related keywords from domain corpus by employing mass diffusion. A bipartite word network is thus constructed based on co-occurrence relations between initial keywords and candidate words. The expanded keywords are identified via two-step mass diffusion which is carried out in the bipartite network. Experimental results prove that the proposed method outperforms both the typical statistical-based approach and graph-based approach. Our research is expected to complement the theoretical framework of keyword expansion and is applicable to the scenarios of query expansion, thesaurus construction, and text clustering.