The systematic processing of unstructured communication data as well as the milestone of pattern recognition in order to determine communication groups in negotiations bears many challenges in Machine Learning. In particular, the so-called curse of dimensionality makes the pattern recognition process demanding and requires further research in the negotiation environment. In this paper, various selected renowned clustering approaches are evaluated with regard to their pattern recognition potential based on high-dimensional negotiation communication data. A research approach is presented to evaluate the application potential of selected methods via a holistic framework including three main evaluation milestones: the determination of optimal number of clusters, the main clustering application, and the performance evaluation. Hence, quantified Term Document Matrices are initially pre-processed and afterwards used as underlying databases to investigate the pattern recognition potential of clustering techniques by considering the information regarding the optimal number of clusters and by measuring the respective internal as well as external performances. The overall research results show that certain cluster separations are recommended by internal and external performance measures by means of a holistic evaluation approach, whereas three of the clustering separations are eliminated based on the evaluation results.

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Systematic pattern recognition as well as the corresponding description of determined patterns entail numerous challenges in the application context of high-dimensional communication data. These can cause increased effort, especially with regard to machine-based processing concerning the determination of regularities in underlying datasets. Due to the increased expansion of dimensions in multidimensional data spaces, determined patterns are no longer interpretable by humans. Taking these challenges into account, this paper investigates to what extent pre-defined communication patterns can be interpreted for the application area of high-dimensional business communication data. An analytical perspective is considered by taking into account a holistic research approach and by subsequently applying selected Machine Learning methods from Association Rule Discovery, Topic Modelling and Decision Trees with regard to the overall goal of semi-automated pattern labelling. The results show that meaningful descriptions can be derived for the interpretation of pre-defined patterns.