Cequel: Cost-Effective Querying of Large Language Models for Text Clustering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Hongtao, Zhang, Taiyan, Yang, Renchi, Xu, Jianliang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wang, Hongtao
Zhang, Taiyan
Yang, Renchi
Xu, Jianliang
author_facet Wang, Hongtao
Zhang, Taiyan
Yang, Renchi
Xu, Jianliang
contents Text clustering aims to automatically partition a collection of documents into coherent groups based on their linguistic features. In the literature, this task is formulated either as metric clustering over pre-trained text embeddings or as graph clustering based on pairwise similarities derived from an oracle, e.g., a large machine learning model. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved this field by providing high-quality contextualized embeddings and accurate semantic similarity estimates. However, leveraging LLMs at scale introduces substantial computational and financial costs due to the large number of required API queries or inference calls. To address this issue, we propose Cequel, a cost-effective framework that achieves accurate text clustering under a limited budget of LLM queries. At its core, Cequel constructs must-link and cannot-link constraints by selectively querying LLMs on informative text pairs or triplets, identified via our proposed algorithms, EdgeLLM and TriangleLLM. These constraints are then utilized in a weighted constrained clustering algorithm to form high-quality clusters. Specifically, EdgeLLM and TriangleLLM employ carefully designed greedy selection strategies and prompting techniques to identify and extract informative constraints efficiently. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Cequel consistently outperforms existing methods in unsupervised text clustering under the same query budget.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Cequel: Cost-Effective Querying of Large Language Models for Text Clustering
Wang, Hongtao
Zhang, Taiyan
Yang, Renchi
Xu, Jianliang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Text clustering aims to automatically partition a collection of documents into coherent groups based on their linguistic features. In the literature, this task is formulated either as metric clustering over pre-trained text embeddings or as graph clustering based on pairwise similarities derived from an oracle, e.g., a large machine learning model. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved this field by providing high-quality contextualized embeddings and accurate semantic similarity estimates. However, leveraging LLMs at scale introduces substantial computational and financial costs due to the large number of required API queries or inference calls. To address this issue, we propose Cequel, a cost-effective framework that achieves accurate text clustering under a limited budget of LLM queries. At its core, Cequel constructs must-link and cannot-link constraints by selectively querying LLMs on informative text pairs or triplets, identified via our proposed algorithms, EdgeLLM and TriangleLLM. These constraints are then utilized in a weighted constrained clustering algorithm to form high-quality clusters. Specifically, EdgeLLM and TriangleLLM employ carefully designed greedy selection strategies and prompting techniques to identify and extract informative constraints efficiently. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Cequel consistently outperforms existing methods in unsupervised text clustering under the same query budget.
title Cequel: Cost-Effective Querying of Large Language Models for Text Clustering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15640