A Comparative Study on Transfer Learning and Distance Metrics in Semantic Clustering over the COVID-19 Tweets

Abstract: This paper is a comparison study in the context of Topic Detection on COVID-19 data. There are various approaches for Topic Detection, among which the Clustering approach is selected in this paper. Clustering requires distance and calculating distance needs embedding. The aim of this research is to simultaneously study the three factors of embedding methods, distance metrics and clustering methods and their interaction. A dataset including one-month tweets collected with COVID-19-related hashtags is used for this study. Five methods, from earlier to new methods, are selected among the embedding methods: Word2Vec, fastText, GloVe, BERT and T5. Five clustering methods are investigated in this paper that are: k-means, DBSCAN, OPTICS, spectral and Jarvis-Patrick. Euclidian distance and Cosine distance as the most important distance metrics in this field are also examined. First, more than 7,500 tests are performed to tune the parameters. Then, all the different combinations of embedding methods with distance metrics and clustering methods are investigated by silhouette metric. The number of these combinations is 50 cases. First, the results of these 50 tests are examined. Then, the rank of each method is taken into account in all the tests of that method. Finally, the major variables of the research (embedding methods, distance metrics and clustering methods) are studied separately. Averaging is performed over the control variables to neutralize their effect. The experimental results show that T5 strongly outperforms other embedding methods in terms of silhouette metric. In terms of distance metrics, cosine distance is weakly better. DBSCAN is also superior to other methods in terms of clustering methods.