Topic Detection and Tracking Evaluation Overview

Abstract

The objective of the Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) program is to develop technologies that search, organize and structure multilingual, news oriented textual materials from a variety of broadcast news media. This research program uses controlled laboratory simulations of hypothetical systems to test the efficacy of potential technologies, to gauge research progress, and to provide a forum for the exchange of research information. This chapter introduces TDT's evaluation methodology including: the Linguistic Data Consortium's TDT corpora, evaluation metrics used in TDT and the five TDT research tasks: Topic Tracking, Link Detection, Topic Detection, First Story Detection, and Story Segmentation.