The topic detection and tracking (TDT) is an issue of natural language processing, which concerns with solving the problem of information explosion. The Weibo TDT is a central issue in recent years. A bad performance is usually achieved for Weibo with a short text, while the topic detection of a long text is widely used in the industry with better results. Weibo's features of short text and not very clear meaning make the clustering algorithms' effect not ideal in topic detection. So this paper focuses on finding a new way to improve the effect of clustering for Weibo. Weibo features fast renewal and strong timeliness. Hot topics produced by Weibo show burstiness, and their representative words increase in a great extent. With this feature in mind, improving the representative word's weight to a certain degree is a good way to give a prominence to the feature of short text. The burstiness of the words is a thing to consider, similar to the kinetic theory of the object. The formula of the kinetic energy theorem is used in this paper. Then an improved feature extraction algorithm named the TFIDF-KE (term frequency-inverse document frequency-kinetic energy) is proposed. The new algorithm consists of the kinetic energy and the TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency). The formula of the kinetic energy theorem is used to evaluate the burstiness of the words and add the value to the formula. Then, the weight of some important words can be improved when extracting features. Finally, the implementation of the CURE (clustering using representatives) algorithm completes the Weibo topic detection task. The method presented in this paper describes burstiness of text and feature and solves the problem that the feature of bursty hot topics is not obvious, when clustering in a certain extent. The experimental results show that the method can effectively improve the effect of topic detection in some degree and a better accuracy rate P can be achieved, as well as the R and F values of the recall rate. So TF-IDF-KE is an effective optimization method and can well be used for the task of the TDT.

Weibo  /  TF-IDF  /  topic detection  /  TDT  /  text clustering