# CEIL: A General Classification-Enhanced Iterative Learning Framework for Text Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11061 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11061/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [Towards K-means-friendly Spaces: Simultaneous Deep Learning and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04794/) (2016)
- [Joint Unsupervised Learning of Deep Representations and Image Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03628/) (2016)
- [OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01998/) (2021)
- [Supporting Clustering with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12953/) (2021)
- [Self-Taught Convolutional Neural Networks for Short Text Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00185/) (2017)
- [Text Understanding from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01710/) (2015)
- [Enhancement of Short Text Clustering by Iterative Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11631/) (2020)
- [Representation learning for very short texts using weighted word embedding aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00570/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text clustering, as one of the most fundamental challenges in unsupervised learning, aims at grouping semantically similar text segments without relying on human annotations. With the rapid development of deep learning, deep clustering has achieved significant advantages over traditional clustering methods. Despite the effectiveness, most existing deep text clustering methods rely heavily on representations pre-trained in general domains, which may not be the most suitable solution for clustering in specific target domains. To address this issue, we propose CEIL, a novel Classification-Enhanced Iterative Learning framework for short text clustering, which aims at generally promoting the clustering performance by introducing a classification objective to iteratively improve feature representations. In each iteration, we first adopt a language model to retrieve the initial text representations, from which the clustering results are collected using our proposed Category Disentangled Contrastive Clustering (CDCC) algorithm. After strict data filtering and aggregation processes, samples with clean category labels are retrieved, which serve as supervision information to update the language model with the classification objective via a prompt learning approach. Finally, the updated language model with improved representation ability is used to enhance clustering in the next iteration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the CEIL framework significantly improves the clustering performance over iterations, and is generally effective on various clustering algorithms. Moreover, by incorporating CEIL on CDCC, we achieve the state-of-the-art clustering performance on a wide range of short text clustering benchmarks outperforming other strong baseline methods.