Blogger, stick to your story: modeling topical noise in blogs with coherence measures

Topical noise in blogs arises when bloggers digress from the central topical thrust of their blogs. We introduce a method to explicitly incorporate a model of topical noise into a language modeling approach to the task of blog distillation. Topical noise is integrated into the model using a coherence score, which reflects the tightness of the topical structure of a blog. Tests performed on the TRECBlog06 corpus show that a naive integration of the coherence score as blog prior fails to achieve performance improvements. Instead, we develop a set of more sophisticated models in which the coherence score is weighted by a function of the blog retrieval score. The proposed models help improve effectiveness of our language modeling approach to the blog distillation task. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; H.3.4 Systems and Software; H.4 [Information Systems Applications]: H.4.2 Types of Systems; H.4.m Miscellan...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Jiyin He, Wouter Weerkamp, Martha Larson, Maarten de Rijke
• Keywords: Blog, Coherence Score, Information Technology, SIGIR 2008, Topical Noise