Topic Detection, a New Application for Lexical Chaining?

This paper discusses a system for online new event detection as part of the Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) initiative. Our approach uses a single-pass clustering algorithm, which includes a time-based selection model and a thresholding model. We evaluate two benchmark systems: The first indexes documents by keywords and the second attempts to perform conceptual indexing through the use of the WordNet thesaurus software. We propose a more complex document/cluster representation using lexical chaining. We believe such a representation will improve the overall performance of our system by allowing us to encapsulate the context surrounding a word and to disambiguate its senses.