Results of the 2003 Topic Detection and Tracking Evaluation

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) administered the sixth open evaluation of Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) technologies in November of 2003. The TDT project supports development of technologies that automatically organize eventrelated news stories. The program leverages expertise in core technologies, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Document Retrieval (DR), and Machine Translation (MT) to build the TDT technologies. The participants in the 2003 TDT project built systems that organized broadcast news and newswire stories collected from Arabic, English and Mandarin Chinese sources. There were four evaluation tasks in the 2003 evaluation: new event detection, topic detection, topic tracking and link detection. The 2004 TDT Evaluation is scheduled for Fall 2004. The evaluation will focus on the core task of monolingual TDT tasks. The community is also experimenting with a new evaluation task, Hierarchical Topic Detection (HTD). HTD aims to overcome the problems with the topic detection task – specifically topic granularity and multiple-topic stories.