Graph-augmented and Over-smoothing-resistant Contrastive Clustering for Short Text

Abstract Short texts present significant challenges for clustering due to semantic sparsity, limited contextual information, and ambiguous category boundaries. While recent studies incorporating contrastive learning and cluster structure optimization have improved performance, their reliance on augmented samples often introduces noise and weakens the capacity of pretrained language models to capture fine-grained semantics. To address these issues, we propose a Graph-augmented and Over-smoothing-resistant Contrastive Clustering framework (GOCC). Specifically, GOCC constructs sentence-level and cluster-level graphs to capture local semantic similarity and global structural patterns, incorporating these signals into sentence representations to enhance representational quality and clustering suitability. Moreover, we introduce a contrastive mechanism based on intermediate layer representations within graph-augmented contrastive learning to alleviate semantic over-smoothing caused by deep networks. Finally, a target-distribution-driven clustering optimization strategy is employed to leverage high-confidence samples in guiding cluster assignments. Experimental results on several benchmark short text datasets demonstrate that GOCC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of clustering accuracy and normalized mutual information.