SpotSigs: robust and efficient near duplicate detection in large web collections

Motivated by our work with political scientists who need to manually analyze large Web archives of news sites, we present SpotSigs, a new algorithm for extracting and matching signatures for near duplicate detection in large Web crawls. Our spot signatures are designed to favor naturallanguage portions of Web pages over advertisements and navigational bars. The contributions of SpotSigs are twofold: 1) by combining stopword antecedents with short chains of adjacent content terms, we create robust document signatures with a natural ability to filter out noisy components of Web pages that would otherwise distract pure n-gram-based approaches such as Shingling; 2) we provide an exact and efficient, selftuning matching algorithm that exploits a novel combination of collection partitioning and inverted index pruning for high-dimensional similarity search. Experiments confirm an increase in combined precision and recall of more than 24 percent over state-of-the-art approaches such as Shingl...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Martin Theobald, Jonathan Siddharth, Andreas Paepcke
• Keywords: Information Technology, Large Web, SIGIR 2008, Signatures, Web Pages