A lightweight mixup-based short texts clustering for contrastive learning

Front Comput Neurosci. 2024 Jan 11:17:1334748. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2023.1334748. eCollection 2023.

Abstract

Traditional text clustering based on distance struggles to distinguish between overlapping representations in medical data. By incorporating contrastive learning, the feature space can be optimized and applies mixup implicitly during the data augmentation phase to reduce computational burden. Medical case text is prevalent in everyday life, and clustering is a fundamental method of identifying major categories of conditions within vast amounts of unlabeled text. Learning meaningful clustering scores in data relating to rare diseases is difficult due to their unique sparsity. To address this issue, we propose a contrastive clustering method based on mixup, which involves selecting a small batch of data to simulate the experimental environment of rare diseases. The contrastive learning module optimizes the feature space based on the fact that positive pairs share negative samples, and clustering is employed to group data with comparable semantic features. The module mitigates the issue of overlap in data, whilst mixup generates cost-effective virtual features, resulting in superior experiment scores even when using small batch data and reducing resource usage and time overhead. Our suggested technique has acquired cutting-edge outcomes and embodies a favorable strategy for unmonitored text clustering.

Keywords: contrastive learning; data augmentation; mixup; overlapping; text clustering.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by Program for Scientific Research Innovation Team in Colleges and Universities of Anhui Province 2022AH010095 and the Natural Science Research Project of Anhui Educational Committee under grant 2023AH052180.