Advancing Keyword Clustering Techniques: A Comparative Exploration of Supervised and Unsupervised Methods : Investigating the Effectiveness and Performance of Supervised and Unsupervised Methods with Sentence Embeddings

Sammanfattning: Clustering keywords is an important Natural Language Processing task that can be adopted by several businesses since it helps to organize and group related keywords together. By clustering keywords, businesses can better understand the topics their customers are interested in. This thesis project provides a detailed comparison of two different approaches that might be used for performing this task and aims to investigate whether having the labels associated with the keywords improves the clusters obtained. The keywords are clustered using both supervised learning, training a neural network and applying community detection algorithms such as Louvain, and unsupervised learning algorithms, such as HDBSCAN and K-Means. The evaluation is mainly based on metrics like NMI and ARI. The results show that supervised learning can produce better clusters than unsupervised learning. By looking at the NMI score, the supervised learning approach composed by training a neural network with Margin Ranking Loss and applying Kruskal achieves a slightly better score of 0.771 against the 0.693 of the unsupervised learning approach proposed, but by looking at the ARI score, the difference is more relevant. HDBSCAN achieves a lower score of 0.112 compared to the supervised learning approach with the Margin Ranking Loss (0.296), meaning that the clusters formed by HDBSCAN may lack meaningful structure or exhibit randomness. Based on the evaluation metrics, the study demonstrates that supervised learning utilizing the Margin Ranking Loss outperforms unsupervised learning techniques in terms of cluster accuracy. However, when trained with a BCE loss function, it yields less accurate clusters (NMI: 0.473, ARI: 0.108), highlighting that the unsupervised algorithms surpass this particular supervised learning approach.