Topic Detection and Extraction in Chat

Internet-based Chat environments such as Internet relay Chat and instant messaging pose a challenge for data mining and information retrieval systems due to the multi-threaded, overlapping nature of the dialog and the nonstandard usage of language. In this paper we present preliminary methods of topic detection and topic thread extraction that augment a typical TF-IDF-based vector space model approach with temporal relationship information between posts of the Chat dialog combined with WordNet hypernym augmentation. We show results that promise better performance than using only a TF-IDF bag-of-words vector space model.