Wordnet-based metrics do not seem to help document clustering

Abstract. In most document clustering systems documents are repre-sented as normalized bags of words and clustering is done maximizing cosine similarity between documents in the same cluster. While this representation was found to be very effective at many different types of clustering, it has some intuitive drawbacks. One such drawback is that documents containing words with similar meanings might be considered very different if they use different words to say the same thing. This happens because in a traditional bag of words, all words are assumed to be orthogonal. In this paper we examine many possible ways of using WordNet to mitigate this problem, and find that WordNet does not help clustering if used only as a means of finding word similarity.