Fact-focused novelty detection: a feasibility study

Methods for detecting sentences in an input document set, which are both relevant and novel with respect to an information need, would be of direct benefit to many systems, such as extractive text summarizers. However, satisfactory levels of agreement between judges performing this task manually have yet to demonstrated, leaving researchers to conclude that the task is too subjective. In previous experiments, judges were asked to first identify sentences that are relevant to a general topic, and then to eliminate sentences from the list that do not contain new information. Currently, a new task is proposed, in which annotators perform the same procedure, but within the context of a specific, factual information need. In the experiment, satisfactory levels of agreement between independent annotators were achieved on the first step of identifying sentences containing relevant information relevant. However, the results indicate that judges do not agree on which sentences contain novel information.