Supporting Browsing of Blogs via Text Clustering and Concept Analysis Techniques: A Task-Oriented Evaluation Approach

Blogs are a good online tool that encourages information exchange and knowledge sharing. However, blog users often face two challenges. First, blog contents are often categorized vaguely or inadequately by authors. Second, many popular blogs sort content by date. Consequently, when a blog user does not possess the right keywords forinformation retrieval, he or she must take time to browse the contents by chronological order until the relevant content is identified. This study addressed the problems by using the hierarchical agglomerative clustering and formal concept analysis methods to re-classify blog contents. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed automated text clustering solution, we further conducted user task-oriented evaluation. The results showed that the technique can help authors (bloggers) definenew categories and refine existing categories. In addition, the concept hierarchy applied in each category helped the blog users to quickly discover the needed information.