The Nature of Novelty Detection

Sentence level novelty detection aims at reducing redundant sentences from a sentence list. In the task, sentences appearing later in the list with no new meanings are eliminated. Aiming at a better accuracy for detecting redundancy, this paper reveals the nature of the novelty detection task currently overlooked by the Novelty community $-$ Novelty as a combination of the partial overlap (PO, two sentences sharing common facts) and complete overlap (CO, the first sentence covers all the facts of the second sentence) relations. By formalizing novelty detection as a combination of the two relations between sentences, new viewpoints toward techniques dealing with Novelty are proposed. Among the methods discussed, the similarity, overlap, pool and language modeling approaches are commonly used. Furthermore, a novel approach, selected pool method is provided, which is immediate following the nature of the task. Experimental results obtained on all the three currently available novelty datasets showed that selected pool is significantly better or no worse than the current methods. Knowledge about the nature of the task also affects the evaluation methodologies. We propose new evaluation measures for Novelty according to the nature of the task, as well as possible directions for future study.Comment: This paper pointed out the future direction for novelty detection research. 37 pages, double spaced versio

Experiments in terabyte searching, genomic retrieval and novelty detection for TREC 2004

In TREC2004, Dublin City University took part in three tracks, Terabyte (in collaboration with University College Dublin), Genomic and Novelty. In this paper we will discuss each track separately and present separate conclusions from this work. In addition, we present a general description of a text retrieval engine that we have developed in the last year to support our experiments into large scale, distributed information retrieval, which underlies all of the track experiments described in this document

Creating a test collection to evaluate diversity in image retrieval

This paper describes the adaptation of an existing test collection for image retrieval to enable diversity in the results set to be measured. Previous research has shown that a more diverse set of results often satisfies the needs of more users better than standard document rankings. To enable diversity to be quantified, it is necessary to classify images relevant to a given theme to one or more sub-topics or clusters. We describe the challenges in building (as far as we are aware) the first test collection for evaluating diversity in image retrieval. This includes selecting appropriate topics, creating sub-topics, and quantifying the overall effectiveness of a retrieval system. A total of 39 topics were augmented for cluster-based relevance and we also provide an initial analysis of assessor agreement for grouping relevant images into sub-topics or clusters

Sparse spatial selection for novelty-based search result diversification

Abstract. Novelty-based diversification approaches aim to produce a diverse ranking by directly comparing the retrieved documents. However, since such approaches are typically greedy, they require O(n 2) documentdocument comparisons in order to diversify a ranking of n documents. In this work, we propose to model novelty-based diversification as a similarity search in a sparse metric space. In particular, we exploit the triangle inequality property of metric spaces in order to drastically reduce the number of required document-document comparisons. Thorough experiments using three TREC test collections show that our approach is at least as effective as existing novelty-based diversification approaches, while improving their efficiency by an order of magnitude.

Application and evaluation of multi-dimensional diversity

Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems mostly focus on finding documents relevant to queries without considering other documents in the search results. This approach works quite well in general cases; however, this also means that the set of returned documents in a result list can be very similar to each other. This can be an undesired system property from a user's perspective. The creation of IR systems that support the search result diversification present many challenges, indeed current evaluation measures and methodologies are still unclear with regards to specific search domains and dimensions of diversity. In this paper, we highlight various issues in relation to image search diversification for the ImageClef 2009 collection and tasks. Furthermore, we discuss the problem of defining clusters/subtopics by mixing diversity dimensions regardless of which dimension is important in relation to information need or circumstances. We also introduce possible applications and evaluation metrics for diversity based retrieval

A new metric for patent retrieval evaluation

Patent retrieval is generally considered to be a recall-oriented information retrieval task that is growing in importance. Despite this fact, precision based scores such as mean average precision (MAP) remain the primary evaluation measures for patent retrieval. Our study examines different evaluation measures for the recall-oriented patent retrieval task and shows the limitations of the current scores in comparing different IR systems for this task. We introduce PRES, a novel evaluation metric for this type of application taking account of recall and user search effort. The behaviour of PRES is demonstrated on 48 runs from the CLEF-IP 2009 patent retrieval track. A full analysis of the performance of PRES shows its suitability for measuring the retrieval effectiveness of systems from a recall focused perspective taking into account the expected search effort of patent searchers

A Comparison of Nuggets and Clusters for Evaluating Timeline Summaries

There is growing interest in systems that generate timeline summaries by filtering high-volume streams of documents to retain only those that are relevant to a particular event or topic. Continued advances in algorithms and techniques for this task depend on standardized and reproducible evaluation methodologies for comparing systems. However, timeline summary evaluation is still in its infancy, with competing methodologies currently being explored in international evaluation forums such as TREC. One area of active exploration is how to explicitly represent the units of information that should appear in a 'good' summary. Currently, there are two main approaches, one based on identifying nuggets in an external 'ground truth', and the other based on clustering system outputs. In this paper, by building test collections that have both nugget and cluster annotations, we are able to compare these two approaches. Specifically, we address questions related to evaluation effort, differences in the final evaluation products, and correlations between scores and rankings generated by both approaches. We summarize advantages and disadvantages of nuggets and clusters to offer recommendations for future system evaluation

Ensemble clustering for result diversification

This paper describes the participation of the University of Twente in the Web track of TREC 2012. Our baseline approach uses the Mirex toolkit, an open source tool that sequantially scans all the documents. For result diversification, we experimented with improving the quality of clusters through ensemble clustering. We combined clusters obtained by different clustering methods (such as LDA and K-means) and clusters obtained by using different types of data (such as document text and anchor text). Our two-layer ensemble run performed better than the LDA based diversification and also better than a non-diversification run