Topic Tracking with the PRISE Information Retrieval System

Information retrieval systems offer an attractive alternative to construction of a topic tracking system from scratch. The freely available PRISE vector space text retrieval system was applied to the TDT-2 topic tracking task. A simple version of the Rocchio formula was used for profile formulation and a retrieval status value threshold was used in conjunction with a temporal cutoff to make hard decisions. The results indicate that our simple approach produced a credible system, but comparison with results achieved by other systems indicates that there is room for improvement. The paper concludes by identifying some promising directions for further work that would be compatible with our approach.