ITL Hosts Topic Detection and Tracking Workshop on Text Organization

The Information Access Division hosted the fourth annual Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) Evaluation Workshop on November 12 and 13, 2001. The TDT program develops technologies that search, organize and structure news oriented textual materials from a variety of broadcast news media in both the English and Mandarin languages. The research driven program uses controlled laboratory simulations of hypothetical systems to test the efficacy of potential technologies to access the continuously flowing information that is available from news producing entities. This year’s workshop involved 21 academic and corporate researchers who participated in the NIST administered TDT evaluation that occurred during the Fall of 2001.

Another evaluation is planned for the Fall of 2002. A new corpus will be used which includes not only English and Mandarin broadcast news recordings, but also Arabic. The community has previously shown it is possible to track and organize events in English and Mandarin; the introduction of Arabic will further test this result.

More information about the program is available on the TDT website: http://www.nist.gov/TDT.

CONTACT: Jonathan Fiscus x3182