Comment-based multi-view clustering of web 2.0 items

Clustering Web 2.0 items (i.e., web resources like videos, images) into semantic groups benefits many applications, such as organizing items, generating meaningful tags and improving web search. In this paper, we systematically investigate how user-generated comments can be used to improve the clustering of Web 2.0 items. In our preliminary study of Last.fm, we find that the two data sources extracted from user comments -- the textual comments and the commenting users -- provide complementary evidence to the items' intrinsic features. These sources have varying levels of quality, but we importantly we find that incorporating all three sources improves clustering. To accommodate such quality imbalance, we invoke multi-view clustering, in which each data source represents a view, aiming to best leverage the utility of different views. To combine multiple views under a principled framework, we propose CoNMF (Co-regularized Non-negative Matrix Factorization), which extends NMF for multi-view clustering by jointly factorizing the multiple matrices through co-regularization. Under our CoNMF framework, we devise two paradigms -- pair-wise CoNMF and cluster-wise CoNMF -- and propose iterative algorithms for their joint factorization. Experimental results on Last.fm and Yelp datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. In Last.fm, CoNMF betters k-means with a statistically significant F1 increase of 14%, while achieving comparable performance with the state-of-the-art multi-view clustering method CoSC (Co-regularized Spectral Clustering). On a Yelp dataset, CoNMF outperforms the best baseline CoSC with a statistically significant performance gain of 7%.