Topic tracking based on keywords dependency profile

Abstract

Topic tracking is an important task of Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT). Its purpose is to detect stories, from a stream of news, related to known topics. Each topic is "known" by its association with several sample stories that discuss it. In this paper, we propose a new method to build the keywords dependency profile (KDP) of each story and track topic basing on similarity between the profiles of topic and story. In this method, keywords of a story are selected by document summarization technology. The KDP is built by keywords co-occurrence frequency in the same sentences of the story. We demonstrate this profile can describe the core events in a story accurately. Experiments on the mandarin resource of TDT4 and TDT5 show topic tracking system basing on KDP improves the performance by 13.25% on training dataset and 7.49% on testing dataset comparing to baseline. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.