Introduction

Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) refers to automatic techniques for finding topically related material in streams of data such as newswire and broadcast news. The TDT3 corpus was created to support three TDT3 tasks: find topically homogeneous sections (segmentation), detect the occurrence of new events (detection), and track the reoccurrence of old or new events (tracking). For further information on TDT3 please visit our TDT3 Information Pages.

Data

The TDT3 Multilanguage Text Corpus Version 2.0 is the first general release of this collection (Version 1.0 was made available only to participants in the TDT 1999 and 2000 evaluation tests). It contains data from the same nine sources found in TDT2, plus two additional English television sources. Like TDT2, it provides both manually-created and automatically-generated text for most sources.

For TDT3, the daily collection took place over a period of three months (October - December 1998). The sources and approximate number of stories per source are as follows:

    English sources                              Thousands of stories
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    New York Times Newswire Service                  6.9
    Associated Press Worldstream Service             7.3
    Cable News Network, "Headline News"              9.0
    American Broadcasting Co., "World News Tonight"  1.0
    Public Radio International, "The World"          1.6
    Voice of America, English news programs          3.9
    MS-NBC, "News with Brian Williams"               0.7
    National Broadcasting Co., "NBC Nightly News"    0.8
        Total English stories:                       31.2 thousand

    Mandarin sources
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    Xinhua News Agency                               5.2
    Zaobao News Agency                               3.8
    Voice of America, Mandarin Chinese news programs 3.8
	Total Mandarin stories:                      12.8 thousand

    

The goal of Topic Detection and Tracking - Phase 3 (TDT3) is to create core technology to monitor multiple streams of news in multiple languages and media (newswire, radio, television, web sites or some future combination or innovation), segmenting the streams into individual stories, detecting new topics and tracking all stories discussing them. In additional to the TDT2 tasks of segmentation, detection and tracking, TDT3 adds the tasks of first story detection and story-link detection. The goal of the latter is to detect links between stories that discuss the same topic even though the topic has not been defined in advance.

There are two types of files in this publication:

asr_sgm -- text data output from automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems in English and Mandarin, formatted in "TIPSTER- style" SGML, derived from the audio recordings of radio and TV broadcasts. To view a sample of an asr_sgm file please go to example.asr_sgm.

tkn_sgm -- reference text data (newswire, closed captions and manual transcripts), formatted in "TIPSTER-style" SGML. To view a sample of a tkn_sgm file please go to example.tkn_sgm.

Updates

Content Copyright

Portions © 1998 American Broadcasting Company, The Associated Press, Cable News Network, LP, LLLP, National Broadcasting Company, Inc., New York Times, Public Radio International, SPH AsiaOne Ltd, Xinhua News Agency, © 1998-2001 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

The World is a co-production of Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation and is produced at WGBH Boston.