J Syst Sci Syst Eng(Dec 2006) 15(4): 474-492 ISSN: 1004-3756 (Paper) 1861-9576 (Online)

DOI: 10.1007/s11518-006-5029-z CN11-2983/N

A MODIFIED ANT-BASED TEXT CLUSTERING ALGORITHM WITH

SEMANTIC SIMILARITY MEASURE∗

Haoxiang XIA1 Shuguang WANG2 Taketoshi YOSHIDA3

1
Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China
hxxia@dlut.edu.cn ( )
2
BHR-Frontline Technologies (Dalian) Corporation Ltd, Dalian, 116023, China
3
School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa 923-1292 Japan
yoshida@jaist.ac.jp

Abstract
Ant-based text clustering is a promising technique that has attracted great research attention. This
paper attempts to improve the standard ant-based text-clustering algorithm in two dimensions. On one
hand, the ontology-based semantic similarity measure is used in conjunction with the traditional
vector-space-model-based measure to provide more accurate assessment of the similarity between
documents. On the other, the ant behavior model is modified to pursue better algorithmic performance.
Especially, the ant movement rule is adjusted so as to direct a laden ant toward a dense area of the
same type of items as the ant’s carrying item, and to direct an unladen ant toward an area that contains
an item dissimilar with the surrounding items within its Moore neighborhood. Using WordNet as the
base ontology for assessing the semantic similarity between documents, the proposed algorithm is
tested with a sample set of documents excerpted from the Reuters-21578 corpus and the experiment
results partly indicate that the proposed algorithm perform better than the standard ant-based
text-clustering algorithm and the k-means algorithm.
Keywords: Ant-based clustering, text clustering, ant movement rule, semantic similarity measure

1. Introduction with an item outside the group. Such groups are

As an important application field of the data called clusters, which are run-timely formed
clustering technologies (Jain and Murty et al. during the clustering process, instead of being
1999), text clustering is unsupervised pre-defined as in the case of text categorization,
partitioning of a collection of textual documents which commonly refers to the supervised
into self-similar groups so that any item is more partitioning of documents to “labeled” (i.e.,
similar with another item in the same group than pre-classified) sets (Sebastiani 2002). With the

∗
This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants No.70301009
and No. 70431001, and by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan under the
“Kanazawa Region, Ishikawa High-Tech Sensing Cluster of Knowledge-Based Cluster Creation Project”.

© Systems Engineering Society of China & Springer-Verlag 2006

 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA
abundance of textual documents, e.g. over the
World Wide Web and in corporate document
management systems, there is an increasing
demand for text mining techniques (Berry 2003).
Consequently, as a noteworthy branch of text
mining, text clustering has caught great attention
in the last decade; and various data clustering
methods have been applied, e.g. agglomerative
hierarchical clustering (Ward 1963), k-means
(Hartigan and Wong 1979), OPTICS (Ankerst
and Breunig et al. 1999), and genetic-
algorithm-based clustering (Chiou and Lan
2000). However, despite tremendous endeavors,
the performance of the existing methods is not
often satisfactory in actual applications; more
work needs to be done to exploit better text
clustering methods.
Essentially, a text clustering method can be
regarded as a data clustering method combined
with a particular document similarity measure.
Therefore, the general data-clustering algorithm
and the document similarity measure are the
major research subjects on text clustering
methods. These two aspects are also the major
concerns of the present paper.
From the aspect of the data-clustering
algorithm, we notice the recent efforts on the
ant-based clustering approach inspired by the
ideas of “swarm intelligence” (Beni and Wang
1989, Bonabeau and Dorigo et al. 1999), which
refers to the collective intelligent behaviors
emerging from the local interactions of groups
of less-intelligent agents. An early attempt of the
ant-based clustering model was given by
Deneubourg and Goss et al. (1991). They
modeled the corpses-clustering and larvae-
sorting activities respectively observed in the
ants Pheidole pallidula and Leptothorax
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unifasciatus. In their model, the ants tend to pick
up the isolated items (corpses or larvae) and
bring them to the positions that already contain
items of the same type; thus the existing small
clusters may attract the ants to deposit more
items and finally this process would give rise to
the emergence of large clusters. This work
stimulated further researches on developing
ant-based clustering methods in the succeeding
years. A notable effort was made by Lumer and
Faieta (1994), which generalized Deneubourg
and Goss et al.’s model and applied it to
numerical data analysis. Based on these
pioneering contributions, more recent endeavors
on the ant-based clustering models have also
been reported (e.g., Monmarché 1999, Handl
and Meyer 2002, Kanade and Hall 2003, Vizine
and de Castro et al. 2005); and the proposed
ant-based clustering methods have been applied
to various areas, such as graph partitioning
(Kuntz and Snyers et al. 1998), intrusion
detection (Ramos and Abraham 2005), and text
clustering (Handl and Meyer 2002, Hoe and Lai
et al. 2002, Ramos and Merelo 2002). These
efforts reveal that ant-based clustering has
become an active research field. Nevertheless,
despite all the notable work, this field is still
immature; and it is an open problem to develop
more elaborate ant-clustering models for
improving the algorithmic performance.
One focal point of this paper is to improve
the algorithmic performance of ant-based
clustering by modifying the ant movement rule.
Our observation is that in the majority of the
existing ant-based clustering methods, the ant
movement is supposed to be completely blind;
and this blind walk model could possibly
hamper the convergence or at least decrease the
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 A Modified Ant-Based Text Clustering Algorithm with Semantic Similarity Measure
efficiency of the algorithm. To overcome this
limitation, we try to establish some mechanism
to direct a laden ant toward a dense area of items
that are in the same type with the item being
carried by the current ant, and to direct an
unladen ant to a position which contains an item
that is dissimilar with the surrounding items, in
hope that such modified ant movement rule
would boost the algorithm to converge to the
appropriate clusters more rapidly. Besides, other
modifications of the “standard” ant-based
clustering algorithm are also discussed by
making the “picking” and “dropping” thresholds,
as well as each ant’s “vision field”, adjustable
during the clustering process.
The application of the proposed ant
clustering methods to text clustering,
furthermore, leads to the discussion on the
aspect of the associated document similarity
measure. Traditionally, the vector space model
(VSM) (Salton and Wong et al. 1975) is used to
represent documents in text clustering, and
correspondingly the similarity between
documents is usually assessed by the cosine
measure within the word vector space. Such
VSM-based similarity measure has limitations
that may influence the performance of clustering
algorithms. On one hand, because of the
inevitable diversity of representing words of
different documents, the clustering process
would inevitably take place in a ant clustering algorithm to text clustering.
high-dimensional space of word vectors. This
would tremendously decrease the algorithmic
efficiency. To be worse, clustering in a
high-dimensional space is difficult because each
item tends to have the same distance with all the
other items (Beyer and Goldstein et al. 1999).
On the other hand, the semantics of each
476
representing word is largely neglected in VSM.
Two semantically relevant words would always
be treated as orthogonal axes in the vector space;
in result, semantically relevant documents that
are respectively represented by these two words
may be treated as entirely irrelevant. Facing
these limitations, a recent trend is to adopt the
ontology-based semantic similarity measure in
text clustering (e.g. Hotho and Staab et al. 2003,
Jing and Zhou et al. 2006). However, so far as
we know, the semantic similarity measure is
seldom adopted in the existing ant-based text
clustering methods. It would be worthwhile to
examine whether the semantic similarity
measure may help improve the performance of
the ant-based text clustering methods. With the
above consideration, the second contribution of
this paper is to combine the edge-counting
similarity measure (Rada and Mili et al. 1989, Li
and Bandar et al. 2003) with the proposed
ant-based clustering method to develop a novel
text clustering method, and to preliminarily test
its feasibility and performance.
The remainder of this paper is structured as
follows. In Section 2 we present our modified
ant clustering algorithm, based on a brief
description and analysis of the standard ant
clustering algorithm. Section 3 discusses the
semantics-enhanced document similarity
measure used in conjunction with the proposed
Section 4 discusses a preliminary test to
compare the performance of the proposed
algorithm with the standard ant clustering
algorithm and the k-means algorithm. The paper
is finally concluded in Section 5.
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 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA
2. Modified Ant Clustering Algorithm
2.1 Standard Ant Clustering Algorithm
Deneubourg and Goss et al.’s (1991) model
and the subsequent algorithm proposed by
Lumer and Faieta (1994) shaped the basic form
of the ant-based clustering methods; the other
methods that are inspired by ants’ corpses-piling
and larvae-sorting activities are basically
originated from these contributions. Thus we
regard Lumer and Faieta’s algorithm as the
“standard” ant-based clustering algorithm,
which directly stems from Deneubourg and Goss
et al.’s original work.
The standard ant-based clustering algorithm
first assumes that initially the items to be
clustered are randomly laid down on a
two-dimensional m × m grid, where m depends
on the number of items. Each cell in the grid
contains at most one item. A collection of
artificial “ants” are also placed in the same grid
at random. At this initial stage, each ant does not
“carry” any item. After completing such
initialization process, a cyclic process is
designed within which each ant sequentially
conducts the following three activities at each
step:
1) Picking up: If the ant does not carry any
item (i.e. the ant is an “unladen” ant), and
if it “encounters” an item oi, the ant decides
to pick up or to ignore that item according
to a “picking up” probability Pp, which is a
function of local density that determines
the aggregate similarity of the item oi with
its neighboring items. Lower the similarity
is, more probably the item is picked up.
2) Moving: After making the “picking up”
decision, the ant randomly moves from the
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current cell to another cell in the grid. In
some variations of the Deneubourg-style
ant clustering methods, the ant can only
move to an adjacent cell that is not
occupied by another ant; but in some other
variations, the ant can move across any
distance to any other unoccupied cell.
3) Dropping: When the ant reaches a new cell,
and if it carries some item (i.e. it is a
“laden” ant), the ant requires making
another decision whether or not to drop the
laden item to this cell, if this arrived
position is not occupied by another item.
The ant’s decision depends on another
probability (called dropping probability,
Pd ), which is another function of the
similarity between the laden item with the
items neighboring this newly-arrived cell.
More similar items exist in a local area
around the cell, more likely the ant drops
the item.
Repeating such activities, the ants may
gradually devide different types of items into
different clusters. The overall process ends when
the clusters become stable or a given maximal
iteration has been reached.
Obviously, the key factors of the above ant
clustering algorithm are the picking up and
dropping probability functions Pp and Pd. In
Deneubourg and Goss et al.’s model, these two
functions are determined by the following
equations:
Picking up probability,
k
Pp = ( 1 ) 2 (1)
k1 + f
Dropping probability,
f
Pd = ( )2 (2)
k2 + f
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 A Modified Ant-Based Text Clustering Algorithm with Semantic Similarity Measure
Where f = f (oi ) is the aggregate similarity of the
item oi in its neighborhood, while k1 and k2 are
threshold constants (picking threshold and
dropping threshold, respectively).
The prior ant clustering algorithm has shown
good performance in some test cases (Handl and
Knowles et al. 2003). However, it is our own
experience that this algorithm does not
efficiently converge to a proper solution in
various situations. Our critiques on the standard
ant clustering algorithm are threefold:
• In the standard algorithm, the ant
movement is completely random, i.e., at
each step each ant blindly moves toward a
new position. Following this rule, many
ants may probably do nothing helpful for
clustering items at many steps; and this
would hamper the algorithmic efficiency.
In some worse cases, the ants may even fail
to form the proper clusters within the
affortable computation time.
• The ants’ activities on picking up and
dropping documents are solely governed
by two fixed probability parameters
(thresholds). However, it is often difficult
to find out a proper configuration of these
two thresholds so that the ants would
effectively find out a good solution.
• The range in which the aggregate
similarity of the documents is assessed, or
the ants’ “vision field”, is another
important parameter that influences the
algorithmic performance. In the standard
algorithm, this range is also predefined and
fixed. This fixed value may sometimes
cause inappropriate behaviors in the actual
clustering process as well. If an
inappropriately small value is assigned to
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the range, it is often the case that large
clusters would not appear. Instead, if
assigning a big value to the range, the
algorithm may not be able to eliminate the
dissimilar items from a formed cluster.
The limitations of the fixed values of the
parameters in the standard ant clustering
algorithm have partly been addressed by a few
other researches. For example, Vizine and de
Castro et al. (2005) suggested the progressive
ant vision dependent on the aggregate similarity
function (i.e. the function f in Equation (1)). The
same work also proposed a “cooling schedule”
for the run-time adjustment of the picking
threshold, namely to geometrically decrease the
picking threshold to 98 percent every 10000 ant
steps. However, no much work on the
Deneubourg-style ant clustering methods has
been presented to address the blind ant
movement problem. Chen and Xu et al.’s (2004)
critique on this problem was similar to ours; but
their solution, which was different from ours,
was to develop a brand new clustering model
upon the idea of gregarious ant cologies instead
of revising the Deneuburg model.
2.2 Modified Ant Clustering Algorithm
Based on the prior description and discussion,
we propose a modified ant-based clustering
algorithm, trying to overcome the
aforementioned limitations of the standard ant
clustering algorithm. Therefore, our
modifications of the standard ant clustering
algorithm are on three aspects: the modified ant
movement rule, the modified setting of the ant
vision, and the modified setting of the picking
and dropping thresholds.
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 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA
2.2.1 Modified Ant Movement Rule
As previouly discussed, in the standard
algorithm, each ant arbitrarily moves from one
cell to another. Such ant movement may waste
great computational resources as it can be
estimated that, in many steps, some ants take
void actions useless for clustering. It is then
natural to expect that the alleviation of the ants’
void actions would improve the algorithmic
efficiency. The basic heuristics is to redesign the
ant movement rule so as to direct a laden ant to
bring the carried item to a dense area of the
same type of items, and to direct an unladen ant
to an area which contains an item dissimilar with
its surrounding items.
To do so, we assume that each ant is able to
access to a “map” which stores all documents’
positions in the whole grid. This “map” is called
a “global cache” of the document positions.
With this global cache, a laden ant can
theoretically estimate which area in the grid has
the maximal aggregate similarity for the ant’s
currently-carried item; and this ant may then be
directed toward that area. However, to get the
exact position with the maximal aggregate
similarity, each laden ant has to calculate the
aggregate similarity at each position within the
entire grid at each step. This would cost great
computational load if the grid is large-scaled.
Such situation is not desirable. Therefore, we
need to make a trade-off between the accuracy
of locating the positions with the maximal
aggregate similarity and the affordability of the
computational load. Our solution is then to split
the entire grid to a few sub-grids and to
randomly select a cell to calculate the aggregate
similarity in each sub-grid. The number of the
sub-grids is depedent on the estimated number
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of clusters and on the overall scale of the items
to be clustered. What’s more, to avoid the
situation that an ant picks up an item and
deposits it toward another position at which the
aggregate similarity is even lower than that at
the original position, the aggregate similarity at
the current position is also calculated. The
calculated similarities are then compared with
each other, and the ant moves to the position
with the maximal aggregate similarity.
Algorithmically, the movement rule of a laden
ant is depicted by Figure 1.
1. Calculate the aggregate similarity of the
carried item o at the current cell;
2. Split the grid into l*l sub-grids, and
randomly select an empty cell from each
sub-grid;
3. Calculate the aggregate similarity of the
item o at each of the selected cell;
4. Select the cell that has maximal
aggregate similarity within the
randomly-selected cells and the current
cell (i.e. the original cell);
5. Move the ant with the carried item to the
selected cell.
Figure 1 Movement rule of a laden ant
To note, in our approach, the aggregate
similarity of a particular item oi at a particular
position is computed as the average similarity
between the item and the surrounding items
within the r-ranged Moore neighborhood of the
item oi, that is:
∑ sim(o, o j )
j
f (o) = (3)
N (o )
Where f(o) is the aggregate similarity of the item
o in its Moore neighborhood; oj is a neighboring
item of o, and sim(o,oj) is the similarity measure
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 A Modified Ant-Based Text Clustering Algorithm with Semantic Similarity Measure
between o and oj; finally, N(o) is the number of
cells in the Moore neighborhood, with is
dependent on the range of the neighborhood r,
i.e. N(o) = r2.
In contrast to the laden ants which tend to
move toward an area with high aggregate
similarity, an unladen ant tends to move toward
an area which contains an item dissimilar with
the surrounding items. Based on this
consideration, the movement rule of an unladen
ant can be described by Figure 2.
1. Split the grid into l*l sub-grids, and
randomly select a cell that is occupied
by some item from each sub-grid;
2. Calculate the aggregate similarities of
the items that occupy the selected cells
within their Moore neighborhoods;
3. Find the cell that has minimal aggregate
similarity
4. Move the unladen ant to the found cell.
Figure 2 Movement rule of an unladen ant
2.2.2 Run-time Adjustment of Ant Vision
We also concern about the range of the
Moore neighborhood in which the ants assess
the aggregate similarity of documents. This
range of the Moore neighborhood can be
regarded as the ants’ “vision”. Sharing Vizine
and de Castro et al.’s (2005) view, we believe
that the fixed value of the ants’ vision is
inappropriate for clustering. However, we
suggest a different solution for dynamically
adjusting the ant vision, which is based on the
observation that the overall clustering process
can be divided into different stages. As also
analyzed by Handl and Knowles et al. (2003),
the overall clustering process can roughly be
480
divided into three stages. At the initial stage,
some small clusters would appear; at the
intermediate stage, small clusters tend to merge
into larger clusters; and at the final stage, when
the large clusters become gradully stable, the
phenomenon of grouping of small clusters
re-appears. In tune with this observation, we use
an adjustable range of the Moore neighborhood.
During the first one third iterations of the overall
process, a relatively small range, r, is set. Then,
during the second one third iterations, r is raised
by ∆r . During the last one third iterations, r is
decreased to the original value again.
2.2.3 Run-time Adjustment of Picking and
Dropping Thresholds
We argue that the adjustable “picking up”
and “dropping” probability parameters are also
helpful for improving the algorithmic
performance. For the dropping probability, we
assign an independent dropping threshold to
each ant (initially the value of all ants’ dropping
threshold is set equally), instead of using a
uniform threshold for all ants. If an ant has
failed to drop its carried item for several steps, it
decreases its dropping threshold in order to
increase the dropping probability, i.e.,
decreasing k2 to k2 − ∆k until k2=0 ( thus the
item can definitely be dropped). When the item
is finally dropped, the threshold is re-assigned to
the original value.
For the adjustment of the picking threshold,
the basic observation is that the clustering
solution generated by the standard ant-based
clustering technique is not very stable in quite
some situations, especially when setting a
relatively-high picking threshold. If the
threshold is inappropriately high, the ants tend to
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 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA
pick items up from well-established clusters and
therefore destructed the clusters. As a result, the
clusters may cyclically be constructed and
destructed, instead of converging into a stable
solution. To overcome this, we follow Vizine
and de Castro et al.’s (2005) idea of “cooling
schedule” to decrease the picking threshold
gradually when it is estimated that “good”
clusters have formed. But our setting is slightly
different from theirs, to decrease the picking
threshold (k1 in Equation (1)) to 90.0% of the
original level every 5,000 steps, unless the
threshold has reached a minimal value 0.001.
2.2.4 Overall Ant Clustering Process
Based on the prior descriptions about the
modifications of the standard ant clustering
algorithm, the overall process of the proposed
algorithm can be described by Figure 3.
1 Initialize the grid and the ants;
2 Calculate the similarities between
items and form the similarity matrix;
3 Start the iteration of ant behaviors
3.1 For each ant, conduct the
following activities in sequence:
3.1.1 Make picking-up decision
and adjust the picking
threshold every 5,000 ant
steps;
3.1.2 Make ant movement
decision;
3.1.3 Make dropping decision
and adjust the dropping
threshold;
3.2 Adjust the ant vision according
to the specified stages;
4 End the iteration after pre-defined
steps.
Figure 3 The overall process of ant clustering
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3. Semantics-Enhanced Similarity
Measure for Text Clustering
The previous section proposes a modified ant
clustering algorithm. In this section we further
discuss the application of the proposed
algorithm to text clustering. As the performance
of any clustering algorithm highly relies on the
similarity or distance measure between items,
we concern the similarity measure used in text
clustering. Especially we use the semantic
similarity measure in text clustering, attempting
to overcome the limitations of the cosine
measure based on the bag-of-words (i.e.
VSM-based) representation of documents
(Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto 1999, p27-28),
which is widely used by the existing ant-based
text clustering methods.
In general, the semantic document similarity
measures can be categorized into two schools,
namely the edge-counting-based measures and
the information-content-based measures. One
cornerstone of the edge-counting-based
measures is Rada and Mili et al.’s (1989) work,
which proved that the minimal number of edges
separating two concepts within a lexical
taxonomy of “is-a” links could serve as a metric
for measuring the conceptual distance of these
two concepts. Following this idea, various
edge-counting methods for document similarity
measure have been proposed. In contrast,
following the contributions of Resnik (1995) and
Lin (1998), the basic idea behind the
information-content-based methods is to define
the similarity between two concepts as the
maximum of the information context of the
concept that subsumes them in the taxonomic
hierarchy, which can further be calculated by the
information-theoretic entropy of the subsumer
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 A Modified Ant-Based Text Clustering Algorithm with Semantic Similarity Measure
(i.e. the closest common ancestor of the two
concepts) within a corpus. As discussed by
various researchers (e.g. Li and Bandar et al.
2003), both categories of methods have their
advantages and limitations, and this research
direction is still under rapid development.
In this paper, our aim is to apply some
appropriate semantic similarity measure to
enhance ant-based text clustering. We, at the
current stage, choose the edge-counting
approach for semantic similarity measure,
practically due to the lack of a well-formed
corpus, which is necessary for the information-
content-based approach, in testing our algorithm,
With a few modifications and simplifications (in
order to decrease the computational complexity)
from the method given by Li and Bandar et al.
(2003), the similarity measure to be adopted in
this paper is described as follows.
The proposed semantic similarity measure is
based on a lexical hierarchy or ontology that is
comprised of concepts inter-connected through
hyponymy (“is-a”) links. We take into account
two factors for calculating the similarity
between two concepts in the ontology: the path
length between the two concepts, and the depth
of the subsumer in the hierarchy. That means, if
the two concepts the similarity of which we are
going to calculate are c1 and c2, then the
similarity is a function denoted by Equation (4):
sim(c1 , c2 ) = g1 (l ) ⋅ g 2 (h)
Where l is the shortest path connecting c1 and c2;
and h is the depth of the subsumer of c1 and c2.
Here in Equation (4) it is assumed that the
impacts of parameters l and h on the similarity
are independent from one another so that the
similarity function is comprised of
482
independent functions of g1 and g2.
Apparently, the similarity between two
concepts would monotonically decrease as the
path in the ontology to connect them increases.
Furthermore, it would be reasonable to expect
the similarity would decrease at an exponential
rate; therefore g1 is defined by Equation (5):
g1 ( l ) = e − α l (5)
Where α is real constant between 0 and 1.
The depth of the subsumer is derived by
counting the shortest length of links from the
subsumer to the root concept of the ontology.
The intuitive observation of the impact of the
depth on the similarity measure is that the
concepts at higher levels in the lexical hierarchy
contain less semantic information content, and
therefore two adjacent concepts at a higher level
should have less semantic similarity comparing
with two adjacent concepts at a lower level. For
example, consider a fraction of an ontology
about animal classification. Within this ontology,
“canine” and “feline” both belong to “carnivore”;
and two lower level concepts of “leopard” and
“tiger” both belong to the animal category of
“feline”. In this case, people would usually
consider that the similarity between “tiger” and
“leopard” are higher than that between “canine”
and “feline”. In terms of this observation, a
monotonically increasing function of depth h to
similarity can then be defined:
(4) e β h − e− β h
g 2 ( h) = (6)
e β h + e− β h
Where β > 0 is a constant.
So far we have got the the semantic
similarity between two concepts. The semantic
similarity between two documents can
two accordingly be computed. We use a set of
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 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA
“concepts” to form a semantic representation of
a document. Assume document d1 is represent
by concepts (c1,1, c1,2, …,c1,m), and document d2
is represent by concepts (c2,1, c2,2, …,c2,n), the
semantic similarity between these two
documents is then assessed by the following
function:
m n
sims ( d1 , d 2 ) = ( ∑ ∑ sim(c1,i , c2, j )) mn
i =1 j =1
The prior model serves as the basic metric to
assess the similarity between documents in our
text clustering algorithm. However, if solely
using this semantic measure, the algorithm may
encounter difficulties in real-life applications,
due to the uncertain quality of the available
lexical taxonomies, which may not be able to
accurately portray all the needed concepts and
their relations. Therefore, we practically use a
hybrid model that combines the ontology-based
and VSM-based measures, so that the similarity
of two documents can still be be partially
assessed by the VSM-based measure even in the
case that the ontology-based measure does not
work well. The suggested hybrid model is
formulated in Equation (8).
sim(d1, d2 )
= λsimw (d1, d2 ) + (1− λ)sims (d1, d2 )
Equation (8) denotes that the similarity between
two documents is the weighted summation of
the VSM-based similarity (i.e., simw(d1,d2)) and
the ontology-based semantic similarity (i.e.,
sims(d1,d2)). The weight λ depends on the
quality of the ontology being used.
The VSM-based similarity measure used in
Equation (8) is the standard cosine measure.
Here we outline the basic formula to calculate
the VSM-based similarity. In this similarity
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measure, a document is represented by a
collection of words or index terms with the
corresponding weights, which can usually be
calculated by the TFIDF (term frequency/
inverse document frequency) weighting scheme
(Salton and Fox et al. 1983). For a series of
documents, all the representing words form a
vector space, and each document can be
(7)
represented as a vector within this space:
di = ( w1 , w2 ,..., wn ) (9)
Where, n is the dimension of the vector space,
and w1, w2, …, wn are the weights of the index
terms. wk=0 if the k-th index term in the vector
space is not used to represent the specific
document. Consequently, the cosine measure of
the similarity between two documents is defined
by Equation (10):
di ⋅ d j
simw (di , d j ) =
| di | × | d j |
n n n
= (∑ wi,t ⋅ w j ,t ) ( ∑ wi2,t ⋅ ∑ w2j,t ) (10)
t =1 t =1 t =1
4. Evaluation Experiments
In this section the test results of the proposed
algorithm is reported. Although our current test
is still primitive, with a relatively small-sized
(8)
dataset being used, the positive results have
partially indicated the benifits of the proposed
algorithm.
In the current test, 50 documents are
arbitrarily excerpted from the Routers-21578
corpus, which is one of the most-widely adopted
benchmarking datasets in the text mining field
(Lewis 2006). The selected documents cover 5
topics of “gas”, “gold”, “livestock”, “grain”, and
“money”, with each topic containing 10
documents. The keywords (concepts) to
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 A Modified Ant-Based Text Clustering Algorithm with Semantic Similarity Measure

represent these documents are extracted by using “concepts” and calculate the semantic similarity
the text mining tool, TextAnalystTM (Megaputer between two documents according to the
Intelligence Inc. 2006). Furthermore, WordNet® conceptual distance of the representing concepts
(Miller 1995) is used as the base ontology to in WordNet. Setting the parameters as shown in
analyze the semantic similarity between Table 1, sample comparison results of pairs of
concepts, as well as between documents. documents are illustrated in Tables 2, and 3,
With these resources and tools, we test our respectively.
algorithms in two steps: 1) testing the feasibility
Table 1 Parameter setting for similarity measure
and performance of using ontology-based
semantic similarity measure; and 2) testing the Parameter Description of Parameter Value
performance of our revised algorithm, α As described in Equ. (5) 0.08
comparing with the standard ant-based text β As described in Equ. (6) 0.6
clustering algorithm. λ As described in Equ. (8) 0.2
upper- If the path length between 12
4.1 Test of Semantic Similarity Measure length two concepts is larger than
this given number, their
To calculate the semantic similarity between similarity is set to 0
the selected documents, in the current test we
directly treat the TextAnalyst-generated terms as

Table 2 Partial results of the similarity measure for homogeneous documents

VSM-based Cosine Measure Ontology-based Measure

Doc # Gas1 Gas2 Gas3 Gas4 Gas5 Gas1 Gas2 Gas3 Gas4 Gas5
Gas1 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.79604 0.59636 0.79604 0.79604
Gas2 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.8858 0.1609 0.79604 1.0 0.59636 0.97716 0.83020
Gas3 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 0.5454 0.59636 0.59636 1.0 0.59636 0.70644
Gas4 0.0 0.8858 0.0 1.0 0.1721 0.79604 0.97716 0.59636 1.0 0.83245
Gas5 0.0 0.1609 0.5454 0.1721 1.0 0.79604 0.83020 0.70644 0.83245 1.0

Table 3 Partial results of the similarity measure for heterogeneous documents

VSM-based Cosine Measure Ontology-based Measure
Doc # Gas1 Gas2 Gas3 Gas4 Gas10 Gas1 Gas2 Gas3 Gas4 Gas10
Livestock1 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.480 0.487 0.0
Livestock2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.48988 0.48767 0.0
Livestock3 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.64434 0.42996 0.0
Livestock4 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.48988 0.48887 0.0
Livestock10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0069 0.0 0.0 0.525 0.56290 0.00138

484 JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA
Table 2 compares the similarities between
pairs of a few homogeous documents in the
“gas” category. The left part of the table
illustrates the calculation results by the
VSM-based cosine measure; and the right part
illustrates the results by the ontology-based
semantic similarity measure. The results show
that the ontology-based measure performs
significantly better than the cosine measure in
the sense that the latter approach fails to give an
appropriate assessment for the similarity
between two semantically relevant documents
represented by different terms but the former
approach handles such situation well.
Table 3 illustrates the calculation results of
the similarities between heterogeneous
documents. We select five documents in the
category “livestock” and five documents in the
category “gas”. The similarities between the
most pairs of documents of different categories
are zero by the cosine measure. In our
calculation, only the cosine similarity measure
between “livestock10” and “gas10” is non-zero.
By the ontology-based similarity measure, on
the contrary, the similarities between a few pairs
of heterogeneous documents are not
significantly smaller than the similarities
between pairs of homogeneous documents
although this ontology-based measure on the
average performs well to distinguish the
different categories of documents. As shown in
Table 3, the ontology-based similarities between
a “livestock” document and one “gas” document
of “gas1”, “gas2” and “gas10” is zero or
relatively small; however, the similarities
between a “livestock” document and the
documents of “gas3” and “gas4” are basically
around 0.5, which are not perfectly distinct from
JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
the similarities between a pair of homogeneous
documents. As shown in Table 2, the similarity
of a pair of “gas” documents may be less than
0.6 (e.g. the similarity between the documents
“gas2” and “gas3”).
The possible reasons for this phenomenon
are twofold. On one hand, the Reuters-21578
collection is essentially comprised of
economics-related documents. Two documents
may factually have semantic relations with on
another although being artificially classified into
two categories. On the other hand, the used
ontology, WordNet, is a general-purposed lexical
database or a shallow ontology, which might not
accurately describe the sophisticated
semantic-relations between the documents in the
specialized domains. In spite of these reasons,
the results in Table 3 show that the
ontology-based measure may have the limitation
on distinguishing the dissimilar documents from
similar ones. What’s more, to use the
ontology-based measure, the coefficients in
Equations (5) and (6) must be set properly. For
example, if the value of α is too small, the
effect of conceptual distance on the similarity
would be weakened, and the semantically
similar documents would be blurred with the
dissimilar ones.
To sum up, the experiment illustrates that the
proposed ontology-based measure generally
increases the accuracy of similarity measure.
Especially, the ontology-based measure shows
great advantages over the traditional cosine
measure in assessing the semantically similar
documents. However, in practice, there is the
danger that similar documents may not be
precisely distinguished from the dissimilar ones,
if the coefficents α and β are not properly
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 A Modified Ant-Based Text Clustering Algorithm with Semantic Similarity Measure

set, or the used ontology is too shallow or too contains the documents about “money”; the
narrow. To partly alleviate this, in our ant-based second contains the documents about “gold” and
text clustering algorithm, we use a hybrid model “livestock”; the third basically contains
of ontology-based and VSM-based measures, documents about“grain”; and the fourth contains
instead of a “pure” semantic measure, as
currently none of the existing ontologies would
completely fit the needs of all text mining
problems.

4.2 Performance Analysis of the Modified

Ant Algorithm
We test the performance of the proposed
clustering algorithm with the aforementioned
dataset. The basic parameters of the algorithm
are set as shown in Table 4.

Table 4 Parameter setting for the ant algorithm

: Livestock : Money : Gas
Parameter Value : Grain : Gold
Grid Size 15*15
Count of Ants 12 Figure 4 Initial distribution of the documents
k1 : Initial picking threshold 0.35
k2 : Initial dropping threshold 0.35
∆k : variation of picking up threshold 0.02
r: Initial Moore Neighborhood 3
1
∆r : the neighborhood increment 4

With the above setting, the proposed

algorithm is tested. Figures 4 and 5 respectively
illustrate the initial distribution and the 2
distribution after 10,000 iterations of the given
3
documents in an execution of the proposed
algorithm. 4
For the convenience of observation, in
Figure 4 and 5 we distinguish different types of Figure 5 Distribution after 10,000 iterations
documents by different filling patterns of the
cells, which are explained in the legend part of documents about “gas”. This clustering result
Figure 4. As shown in Figure 5, four clusters are basically reflects the predefined categories,
generated by our algorithm: the first cluster except that the documents about “grain” and

486 JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA

“gas” are within the same cluster (i.e. in cluster The recall and the precision of the proposed
2). algorithm are then compared with those of the
In order to numerically evaluate the standard ant clustering algorithm. As we suggest
performance of the proposed algorithm, we modifying the standard ant-based text clustering
furthermore calculate the precision and recall of in two dimensions, namely the modification on
the clustering result. We define the precision of the similarity measure and the modification on
the cluster “j” in the type “i” (predefined for the ant clustering process, we hope to evaluate
the purpose of testing) as: the effects of both modifications. To do so, we
precision(i, j ) = N ij N j (11) test four sets of combinations of the similarity
measure and the ant clustering process: standard
And the recall as: ant clustering with VSM-based similarity
recall (i, j ) = N ij N i (12) measure (SAVS), standard ant clustering with
ontology-based similarity measure (SAOS),
Where, Nij refers to the number of documents in modified ant clustering with VSM-based
the cluster j that belongs to the type i; Ni refers similarity measure (MAVS), and modified ant
the number of documents in the type i; and Nj is clustering with ontology-based similarity
the number of documents in the cluster j. With measure (MAOS). The recall and precision of
these two definitions, the precision and recall of the each method are shown in Table 6 and 7,
the different categories of documents in our respectively.
experiment can be calculated.
The clustering result shown in Figure 5 is the Table 6 Recall comparison of the four methods
result of a typical execution of our proposed SAVS SAOS MAVS MAOS
algorithm on the test dataset. Actually, we do the gas 0.36667 0.76667 0.30000 0.71429
experiment on the same dataset multiple times, gold 0.30000 0.93333 0.39000 0.90000
obtaining somewhat different clustering results grain 0.63333 0.85000 0.37000 0.88571
every time(as the proposed clustering algorithm livestock 0.26667 0.96667 0.28000 1.0000
is in nature a nondeterministic approach). The money 0.36667 0.71667 0.36000 1.0000
average recall and precision of the repeated Average 0.38667 0.84667 0.34000 0.89999
experiments are shown in Table 5.

Table 5 Recall and precision of the test example Table 7 Precision comparison of the four methods

Type Recall Precision SAVS SAOS MAVS MAOS

gas 0.71429 0.75000 gas 0.39000 0.33833 0.43000 0.75000
gold 0.90000 0.82143 gold 0.44000 0.72667 0.45000 0.82143
grain 0.88571 0.66000 grain 0.41000 0.32500 0.42000 0.66000
livestock 1.00000 0.52336 livestock 0.32667 0.49833 0.32000 0.52336
money 1.00000 0.45220 money 0.44667 0.34833 0.45000 0.45222
Average 0.89999 0.64140 Average 0.40267 0.44733 0.41400 0.64140

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 A Modified Ant-Based Text Clustering Algorithm with Semantic Similarity Measure

The comparisons in Tables 6 and 7 depict
that our modifications in the both dimensions
contribute to improve the clustering
performance. Especially, the contribution of the
ontology-based similarity measure is significant
for both improving the recall and precision. The
contribution of the modified ant clustering
that the proposed algorithm, at least in our test
case, has better performance than the standard
ant clustering algorithm and the k-means
algorithm.
Table 8 Comparison with the k-means method
Recall Precision

process performs is mainly on the improvement MAOS k-means MAOS k-means

of the clustering precision, whereas the effect of gas 0.71429 0.42000 0.75000 0.67920

the modified ant clustering process on the recall gold 0.90000 0.32000 0.82143 0.63800

is not so significant. This result basically fits our grain 0.88571 0.36000 0.66000 0.59000
anticipation when designing the algorithm. The livestock 1.0000 0.54000 0.52336 0.56500
main purpose of the modification of the ant money 1.0000 0.62000 0.45222 0.80000

clustering process is to increase the convergence Average 0.89999 0.45200 0.64140 0.65444

speed of the algorithm; and we expect the

improvement of the recall and the precision
basically by using the proposed hybrid similarity
measure. Our experiments show that the
modified ant clustering process has advantage
on the algorithmic efficiency over the standard
ant-clustering process. Using our ant-clustering
algorithm, good clusters are formed and
stabilized after about 5,000 ant steps, whilst the
standard ant clustering algorithm usually reaches
the convergence after 20,000 ant steps.
We also compare the proposed algorithm
with the k-means method, which can be
regarded as today’s benchmarking clustering
technique. The recall and precison comparisons
between our algorithm and the k-means
algorithm are illustrated in Table 8.
The results in Table 8 show that the
clustering precision of the proposed algorithm is
basically at the same level as that of the k-means
algorithm; however, in terms of the recall, the
proposed ant clustering algorithm performs
apparently better than the k-means algorithm.
In summary, the comparison result indicates
5. Conclusions
In this paper, we present a modified
ant-based clustering algorithm, and apply it to
the field of text clustering with the help of the
ontology-based semantic similarity measure
between documents. The proposed algorithm is a
revised version of an algorithm the authors
proposed earlier (Xia and Wang et al. 2006),
trying to increase its scalability to cater for
larger datasets. Our experiments on the proposed
algorithm show that on one hand, the proposed
algorithm efficiently converges to reasonably
good clusters, comparing with the standard
ant-based text clustering algorithm; on the other
hand, the recall and precision of the clustering
results of the proposed algorithm are higher than
the standard ant-based text clustering algorithm
and the k-means algorithm. These results partly
indicate that it may be worthwhile to give
further investigations on the proposed algorithm.
Currently, the authors are still on the way to
test the proposed algorithm and to furthermore
improve the algorithm. Three issues are of our

488 JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

 XIA, WANG and YOSHIDA
central concern. First, we are ongoing to
evaluate the usefulness and performance of the
proposed algorithm with more datasets.
Especially, as we observe in the experiments
being discussed in the present paper, the
WordNet ontology may not be precise enough to
assess the semantic similarities between
Reuters-21578 texts; and this may possibly
influence the performance of the proposed
algorithm. We are considering testing our
algorithm with a more elaborate ontology
together with a text collection that can be more
accurately described by that ontology. A
candidate pair of text collection and ontology is
a text collection excerpted from the Medline
database (Linberg and Siegel et al. 1993) and the
Galen ontology (Rector and Gangemi et al.
1994). The second concern on our future work is
to test the use of the corpus-based or
information-content-based similiarity measure in
our algorithm, to explore the possible
improvement of the overall algorithmic
performance. Finally, at the present work, we
basically concern the Deneubourg-style ant
clustering model; extensive evaluations and
comparisons with other ant-behavior-inspired
clustering models, e.g., Labroché and
Monmarché et al.’s (2002) algorithm based on
the chemical recognition system of ants, and
Chen and Xu et al.’s (2004) algorithm on the ant
sleeping model, are also an interesting direction
for future work.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Prof. Zhongtuo
Wang for helpful comments on this paper. The
kind recommendations from the anonymous
referees are warmly appreciated. Finally, we
JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
would like to thank the Journal’s managing
editor, Prof. Jian Chen, for his hard work and
kind help.
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Global-Link Publisher, Hong Kong
Haoxiang Xia Associate professor at Dalian
University of Technology. He obtained his Ph.D.
degree from Institute of Systems Engineering,
Dalian University of Technology (DUT) in 1998.
Before working at DUT since 2000, he was a
postdoctoral fellow at Institute of Systems
Science, the Chinese Academy of Sciences from
1998 to 2000. He worked at Japan Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology as a visiting
associate professor from 2004 to 2006. His
major research interests include Internet-based
492
information systems, knowledge management
systems, and complex adaptive systems.
Shuguang Wang Software engineer at BHR-
Frontline technologies (Dalian) CO., LTD. He
received his master’s degree from Institute of
Systems Engineering, Dalian University of
Technology in 2006. His research interests are
on data clustering, text mining and evolutionary
algorithms.
Taketoshi Yoshida Professor at Japan Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology. He received
his Ph.D. degree from the department of
Systems Engineering, Case Western Reserve
University in 1984. He worked for IBM Japan
from 1985 to 1997. His research interests are in
systems science and knowledge-handling
information systems.
JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING