ICA and SOM in text document analysis

Abstract

In this study we show experimental results on using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) in document analysis. Our documents are segments of spoken dialogues carried out over the telephone in a customer service, transcribed into text. The task is to analyze the topics of the discussions, and to group the discussions into meaningful subsets. The quality of the grouping is studied by comparing to a manual topical classification of the documents.