Abstract:In the research on IR (information retrieval), lots of clustering algorithms have been developed, and in most of them some parameters should be determined by hand. However, it is very difficult to determine them manually without any prior domain knowledge. To solve this problem, an applicable and efficient clustering algorithm is presented. It aims at avoiding any parameter to be determined by hand, and at the same time, improving the efficiency of clustering and the property of IR. The new clustering algorithm is analyzed on several facets and applied later to cluster Chinese documents. The results of the application confirm that the new clustering algorithm is very applicable and efficient.