The Application of Active Query K-Means in Text Classification

Active learning is a state-of-art machine learning approach to deal with an abundance of unlabeled data. In the field of Natural Language Processing, typically it is costly and time-consuming to have all the data annotated. This inefficiency inspires out application of active learning in text classification. Traditional unsupervised k-means clustering is first modified into a semi-supervised version in this research. Then, a novel attempt is applied to extend the algorithm into active learning scenario with Penalized Min-Max-selection, so as to make limited queries that yield more stable initial centroids. This method utilizes both the interactive query results from users and the underlying distance representation. After tested on a Chinese news dataset, it shows a consistent increase in accuracy while lowering the cost in training.