Human assessments of document similarity

Two studies are reported that examined the reliability of human assessments of document similarity and the association between human ratings and the results of n-gram automatic text analysis (ATA). Human interassessor reliability (IAR) was moderate to poor. However, correlations between average human ratings and n-gram solutions were strong. The average correlation between ATA and individual human solutions was greater than IAR. N-gram length influenced the strength of association, but optimum string length depended on the nature of the text (technical vs. nontechnical). We conclude that the methodology applied in previous studies may have led to overoptimistic views on human reliability, but that an optimal n-gram solution can provide a good approximation of the average human assessment of document similarity, a result that has important implications for future development of document visualization systems

Pairwise similarity of TopSig document signatures

This paper analyses the pairwise distances of signatures produced by the TopSig retrieval model on two document collections. The distribution of the distances are compared to purely random signatures. It explains why TopSig is only competitive with state of the art retrieval models at early precision. Only the local neighbourhood of the signatures is interpretable. We suggest this is a common property of vector space models

Document similarity

In recent years, development of tools and methods for measuring document similarity has become a thriving field in informatics, computer science, and digital humanities. Historically, questions of document similarity have been (and still are) important or even crucial in a large variety of situations. Typically, similarity is judged by criteria which depend on context. The move from traditional to digital text technology has not only provided new possibilities for discovery and measurement of document similarity, it has also posed new challenges. Some of these challenges are technical, others conceptual. This paper argues that a particular, well-established, traditional way of starting with an arbitrary document and constructing a document similar to it, namely transcription, may fruitfully be brought to bear on questions concerning similarity criteria for digital documents. Some simple similarity measures are presented and their application to marked up documents are discussed. We conclude that when documents are encoded in the same vocabulary, n-grams constructed to include markup can be used to recognize structural similarities between documents.publishedVersio

A document management methodology based on similarity contents

The advent of the WWW and distributed information systems have made it possible to share documents between different users and organisations. However, this has created many problems related to the security, accessibility, right and most importantly the consistency of documents. It is important that the people involved in the documents management process have access to the most up-to-date version of documents, retrieve the correct documents and should be able to update the documents repository in such a way that his or her document are known to others. In this paper we propose a method for organising, storing and retrieving documents based on similarity contents. The method uses techniques based on information retrieval, document indexation and term extraction and indexing. This methodology is developed for the E-Cognos project which aims at developing tools for the management and sharing of documents in the construction domain

Topic Similarity Networks: Visual Analytics for Large Document Sets

We investigate ways in which to improve the interpretability of LDA topic models by better analyzing and visualizing their outputs. We focus on examining what we refer to as topic similarity networks: graphs in which nodes represent latent topics in text collections and links represent similarity among topics. We describe efficient and effective approaches to both building and labeling such networks. Visualizations of topic models based on these networks are shown to be a powerful means of exploring, characterizing, and summarizing large collections of unstructured text documents. They help to "tease out" non-obvious connections among different sets of documents and provide insights into how topics form larger themes. We demonstrate the efficacy and practicality of these approaches through two case studies: 1) NSF grants for basic research spanning a 14 year period and 2) the entire English portion of Wikipedia.Comment: 9 pages; 2014 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2014