Experiments in Novelty, Genes and Questions at the University of Iowa

Our system for novelty this year is a refinement of that used for last year. One of the challenges in preparing for the 2002 novelty track was the nature of the training data. Our experiments with using the 2002 evaluation data as training data for this year have shown that the novelty task can in fact be tuned to trade off precision and recall at least across the range of what a given system can detect as novel. Our tuning involved establishing a similarity threshold for sentence relevance and an new entity threshold for novelty.