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Stability and plasticity in learning systems are both equally essential, but achieving stability and plasticity simultaneously is difficult. Adaptive resonance theory (ART) neural networks are known for their plastic and stable learning of categories, hence providing an answer to the so called stability-plasticity dilemma. However, it has been demonstrated recently that contrary to general belief, ART stability is not possible with infinite streaming data. In this paper, we present an improved stabilization strategy for ART neural networks that does not suffer from this problem and that produces a soft-clustering solution as a positive side effect. Experimental results in a task of text clustering demonstrate that the new stabilization strategy works well, but with a slight loss in clustering quality compared to the traditional approach. For real-life intelligent applications in which infinite streaming data is generated, the stable and soft-clustering solution obtained with our approach more than outweighs the small loss in quality.

This paper investigates the abilities of Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) neural networks as miners of hierarchical thematic structure in text collections. We present experimental results with binary ART1 on the benchmark Reuter-21578 corpus. Using both quantitative evaluation with the standard F 1 measure and qualitative visualization of the hierarchy obtained with ART, we discuss how useful ART built hierarchies would be to a user intending to use it as a means to find and access textual information. Our F 1 results show that ART1 produces hierarchical clustering that exhibit a quality exceeding k-means and a hierarchical clustering algorithm. However, we identify several critical problem areas that would make it rather impractical to actually use such a hierarchy in a real-life environment. These predicaments point to the importance of semantic feature selection. Our main contribution is to test in details the applicability of ART to the important domain of hierarchical document clustering, an application of Adaptive Resonance that had received little attention until now.