Multilingual news document clustering:: Two algorithms based on cognate named entities

This paper presents an approach for Multilingual News Document Clustering in comparable corpora. We have implemented two algorithms of heuristic nature that follow the approach. They use as unique evidence for clustering the identification of cognate named entities between both sides of the comparable corpora. In addition, no information about the right number of clusters has to be provided to the algorithms. The applicability of the approach only depends on the possibility of identifying cognate named entities between the languages involved in the corpus. The main difference between the two algorithms consists of whether a monolingual clustering phase is applied at first or not. We have tested both algorithms with a comparable corpus of news written in English and Spanish. The performance of both algorithms is slightly different; the one that does not apply the monolingual phase reaches better results. In any case, the obtained results with both algorithms are encouraging and show that the use of cognate named entities can be enough knowledge for deal with multilingual clustering of news documents.