Investigating the Combination of Bag of Words and Named Entities Approach in Tracking and Detection Tasks among Journalists

The proliferation of many interactive Topic Detection and Tracking (iTDT) systems has motivated researchers to design systems that can track and detect news better. iTDT focuses on user interaction, user evaluation, and user interfaces. Recently, increasing effort has been devoted to user interfaces to improve TDT systems by investigating not just the user interaction aspect but also user and task oriented evaluation. This study investigates the combination of the bag of words and named entities approaches implemented in the iTDT interface, called Interactive Event Tracking (iEvent), including what TDT tasks these approaches facilitate. iEvent is composed of three components, which are Cluster View (CV), Document View (DV), and Term View (TV). User experiments have been carried out amongst journalists to compare three settings of iEvent: Setup 1 and Setup 2 (baseline setups), and Setup 3 (experimental setup). Setup 1 used bag of words and Setup 2 used named entities, while Setup 3 used a combination of bag of words and named entities. Journalists were asked to perform TDT tasks: Tracking and Detection. Findings revealed that the combination of bag of words and named entities approaches generally facilitated the journalists to perform well in the TDT tasks. This study has confirmed that the combination approach in iTDT is useful and enhanced the effectiveness of users' performance in performing the TDT tasks. It gives suggestions on the features with their approaches which facilitated the journalists in performing the TDT tasks.