WEBSOM – Self-organizing maps of document collections

With the WEBSOM method a textual document collection may be organized onto a graphical map display that provides an overview of the collection and facilitates interactive browsing. Interesting documents can be located on the map using a content-directed search. Each document is encoded as a histogram of word categories which are formed by the self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm based on the similarities in the contexts of the words. The encoded documents are organized on another self-organizing map, a document map, on which nearby locations contain similar documents. Special consideration is given to the computation of very large document maps which is possible with general-purpose computers if the dimensionality of the word category histograms is first reduced with a random mapping method and if computationally efficient algorithms are used in computing the SOMs.