Hyperbolic Self-Organizing Maps for Semantic Navigation

Jörg Ontrup, Helge J. Ritter

Abstract: We introduce a new type of Self-Organizing Map (SOM) to navigate in the Semantic Space of large text collections. We propose a “hyper- bolic SOM” (HSOM) based on a regular tesselation of the hyperbolic plane, which is a non-euclidean space characterized by constant negative gaussian curvature. The exponentially increasing size of a neighborhood around a point in hyperbolic space provides more freedom to map the complex information space arising from language into spatial relations. We describe experiments, showing that the HSOM can successfully be applied to text categorization tasks and yields results comparable to other state-of-the-art methods.