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the filtering stage by examing their contents. This way, we

estimate a practical upper-bound of recall for entity-centric stream

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 Filtering is a crucial step in CCR for selecting a potentially

 relevant set of working documents for subsequent steps of the

 pipeline out of a big collection of stream documents. The TREC

 Filtering track defines filtering as a ``system that sifts through

 stream of incoming information to find documents that are relevant to

 a set of user needs represented by profiles''

 \cite{robertson2002trec}. 

In the specific setting of CCR, these profiles are

represented by persistent KB entities (Wikipedia pages or Twitter

users, in the TREC scenario).

 TREC-KBA 2013's participants applied Filtering as a first step  to

 produce a smaller working set for subsequent experiments. As the

 subsequent steps of the pipeline use the output of the filter, the

 final performance of the system is dependent on this step.  The

 filtering step particularly determines the recall of the overall

 system. However, all 141 runs submitted by 13 teams did suffer from

 poor recall, as pointed out in the track's overview paper 

 \cite{frank2013stream}. 

The most important components of the filtering step are cleansing

(referring to pre-processing noisy web text into a canonical ``clean''

text format), and

entity profiling (creating a representation of the entity that can be

used to match the stream documents to). For each component, different

choices can be made. In the specific case of TREC KBA, organisers have

provided two different versions of the corpus: one that is already cleansed,

and one that is the raw data as originally collected by the organisers. 

Also, different

approaches use different entity profiles for filtering, varying from

using just the KB entities' canonical names to looking up DBpedia name

variants, and from using the bold words in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia

entities’ page to using anchor texts from other Wikipedia pages, and from

using the exact name as given to WordNet derived synonyms. The type of entities

(Wikipedia or Twitter) and the category of documents in which they

occur (news, blogs, or tweets) cause further variations.

% A variety of approaches are employed  to solve the CCR

% challenge. Each participant reports the steps of the pipeline and the

% final results in comparison to other systems.  A typical TREC KBA

% poster presentation or talk explains the system pipeline and reports

% the final results. The systems may employ similar (even the same)

% steps  but the choices they make at every step are usually

% different. 

In such a situation, it becomes hard to identify the factors that

result in improved performance. There is  a lack of insight across

different approaches. This makes  it hard to know whether the

improvement in performance of a particular approach is due to

preprocessing, filtering, classification, scoring  or any of the

sub-components of the pipeline.

In this paper, we therefore fix the subsequent steps of the pipeline,

and zoom in on \emph{only} the filtering step; and conduct an in-depth analysis of its

main components.  In particular, we study the effect of cleansing,

entity profiling, type of entity filtered for (Wikipedia or Twitter), and

document category (social, news, etc) on the filtering components'

performance. The main contribution of the

paper are an in-depth analysis of the factors that affect entity-based

stream filtering, identifying optimal entity profiles without

compromising precision, describing and classifying relevant documents

that are not amenable to filtering , and estimating the upper-bound

of recall on entity-based filtering.

\textbf{TODO!!}

We base this analysis on the TREC-KBA 2013 dataset

\footnote{http://http://trec-kba.org/trec-kba-2013.shtml}. This dataset

consists of three main parts: a time-stamped stream corpus, a set of

KB entities to be curated, and a set of relevance judgments. A CCR

system now has to identify for each KB entity which documents in the

stream corpus are to be considered by the human curator.

\subsection{Stream corpus} The stream corpus comes in two versions:

raw and cleaned. The raw and cleansed versions are 6.45TB and 4.5TB

respectively,  after xz-compression and GPG encryption. The raw data

is a  dump of  raw HTML pages. The cleansed version is the raw data

after its HTML tags are stripped off and only English documents

identified with Chromium Compact Language Detector

\footnote{https://code.google.com/p/chromium-compact-language-detector/}

are included.  The stream corpus is organized in hourly folders each

of which contains many  chunk files. Each chunk file contains between

hundreds and hundreds of thousands of serialized  thrift objects. One

thrift object is one document. A document could be a blog article, a

news article, or a social media post (including tweet).  The stream

corpus comes from three sources: TREC KBA 2012 (social, news and

linking) \footnote{http://trec-kba.org/kba-stream-corpus-2012.shtml},

arxiv\footnote{http://arxiv.org/}, and

spinn3r\footnote{http://spinn3r.com/}.

Table \ref{tab:streams} shows the sources, the number of hourly

directories, and the number of chunk files.

 \begin{tabular}{l*{4}{l}l}

TREC-KBA provided relevance judgments for training and

testing. Relevance judgments are given as a document-entity

pairs. Documents with citation-worthy content to a given entity are

annotated  as \emph{vital},  while documents with tangentially

relevant content, or documents that lack freshliness o  with content

that can be useful for initial KB-dossier are annotated as

\emph{relevant}. Documents with no relevant content are labeled

\emph{neutral} and spam is labeled as \emph{garbage}. 

%The inter-annotator agreement on vital in 2012 was 70\% while in 2013 it

%is 76\%. This is due to the more refined definition of vital and the

%distinction made between vital and relevant.

 The TREC Filtering track defines filtering as a ``system that sifts

 through stream of incoming information to find documents that are

 relevant to a set of user needs represented by profiles''

 \cite{robertson2002trec}. Its information needs are long-term and are

 reprsented persistent profiles  unlike the traditional search system

 whose adhoc information need is represented by a search

 query. Adaptive Filtering, one task of the filtering track,  starts

 with  a persistent user profile and a very small number of positive

 examples. A filtering system can improve its user profiles with a

 feedback obtained from interaction with users, and thereby improve

 its performance. The  filtering stage of entity-based stream

 filtering and ranking can be likened to the adaptive filtering task

 of the filtering track. The persistent information needs are the KB

 entities, and the relevance judgments are the small number of postive

 examples.

 Stream filtering: given a stream of documents of news items, blogs

 and social media on one hand and KB entities  on the other, filter

 the stream for  potentially relevant documents  such that the

 relevance classifier(ranker) achieves as maximum performance as

 possible.  Specifically, we conduct in-depth analysis on the choices

 and factors affecting the cleansing step, the entity-profile

 construction, the document category of the stream items, and the type

 of entities (Wikipedia or Twitter) , and finally their impact

 overall performance of the pipeline. Finally, we conduct manual

 examination of the vital documents that defy filtering. We strive to

 answer the following research questions:

The TREC filtering and the filtering as part of the entity-centric

stream filtering and ranking pipepline have different purposes. The

TREC filtering track's goal is the binary classification of documents:

for each incoming docuemnt, it decides whether the incoming document

is relevant or not for a given profile. The docuemnts are either

relevant or not. In our case, the documents have relevance ranking and

the goal of the filtering stage is to filter as many potentially

relevant documents as possible, but less  irrelevant documents as

possible not to obfuscate the later stages of the piepline.  Filtering

as part of the pipeline needs that delicate balance between retrieving

relavant documents and irrrelevant documensts. Bcause of this,

filtering in this case can only be studied by binding it to the later

stages of the entity-centric pipeline. This bond influnces how we do

evaluation.

To achieve this,  we use recall percentages in the filtering stage for

the different choices of entity profiles. However, we use the overall

performance to select the best entity profiles.To generate the overall

pipeline performance we use the official TREC KBA evaluation metric

and scripts \cite{frank2013stream} to report max-F, the maximum

F-score obtained over all relevance cut-offs.