# Representation Learning for Short Text Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09894/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Graph Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05679/) (2018)
- [Variational Deep Embedding: An Unsupervised and Generative Approach to Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05148/) (2016)
- [Structural Deep Clustering Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01633/) (2020)
- [PTE: Predictive Text Embedding through Large-scale Heterogeneous Text Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.00200/) (2015)
- [Clustering with Deep Learning: Taxonomy and New Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07648/) (2018)
- [Detecting Topic and Sentiment Dynamics Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Using Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02304/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Dial-In LLM: Human-Aligned LLM-in-the-loop Intent Clustering for Customer Service Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09049/) (2024)
- [A Rapid Review of Clustering Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07389/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Document and Template Clustering using Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12116/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective representation learning is critical for short text clustering due to the sparse, high-dimensional and noise attributes of short text corpus. Existing pre-trained models (e.g., Word2vec and BERT) have greatly improved the expressiveness for short text representations with more condensed, low-dimensional and continuous features compared to the traditional Bag-of-Words (BoW) model. However, these models are trained for general purposes and thus are suboptimal for the short text clustering task. In this paper, we propose two methods to exploit the unsupervised autoencoder (AE) framework to further tune the short text representations based on these pre-trained text models for optimal clustering performance. In our first method Structural Text Network Graph Autoencoder (STN-GAE), we exploit the structural text information among the corpus by constructing a text network, and then adopt graph convolutional network as encoder to fuse the structural features with the pre-trained text features for text representation learning. In our second method Soft Cluster Assignment Autoencoder (SCA-AE), we adopt an extra soft cluster assignment constraint on the latent space of autoencoder to encourage the learned text representations to be more clustering-friendly. We tested two methods on seven popular short text datasets, and the experimental results show that when only using the pre-trained model for short text clustering, BERT performs better than BoW and Word2vec. However, as long as we further tune the pre-trained representations, the proposed method like SCA-AE can greatly increase the clustering performance, and the accuracy improvement compared to use BERT alone could reach as much as 14%.