@inproceedings{zheng-lu-2026-mast,
    title = "{MAST}: A Multi-View Alignment Strategy for Optimal Transport-Based Contrastive Clustering of Short Text",
    author = "Zheng, Zijian  and
      Lu, Yonghe",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.660/",
    pages = "13483--13500",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Short text clustering has gained significant prominence due to its ubiquity in real-world applications. Despite the recent success of contrastive clustering, existing paradigms still suffer from two critical bottlenecks: (1) conventional data augmentation provides limited semantic granularity and may introduce unintended noise; and (2) the absence of global optimization for cluster assignments often precipitates the accumulation of pseudo-label noise, thereby compromising semantic consistency. To bridge these gaps, we propose MAST, a Multi-view Alignment Strategy with Transport-based clustering. MAST constructs complementary structural views to capture multi-granularity semantic features and introduces a multi-view contrastive objective that jointly aligns original, augmented, and structure-enhanced embeddings. To mitigate representation over-smoothing, we incorporate structure-aware negative reweighting and intermediate-layer negative sampling. Furthermore, MAST employs high-confidence guided refinement and an optimal transport-based pseudo-label alignment mechanism to enforce global semantic consistency across multiple views. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAST consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new competitive baseline for short text clustering."
}