METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR CLUSTERING HIERARCHICALLY RELATED INFORMATION

A method for partitioning a tree-structured discussion or other tree structured collections of texts into clusters dealing with identifiable subtopics, if such subtopics exist, or into manageable partitions if not. Each document is represented by a vector and is initially placed in a cluster containing only that document. Then a sequence of cluster combinations is performed, at each step combining the most similar two clusters, where the most similar two clusters are the clusters related by the most similar pair of document vectors, into a new cluster. The process can be halted before all clusters are combined based on application-specific criteria.