Topic Detection and Tracking Pilot Study Final Report

Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) is a DARPA-sponsored initiative to investigate the state of the art in finding and following new events in a stream of broadcast news stories. The TDT problem consists of three major tasks: (1) segmenting a stream of data, especially recognized speech, into distinct stories; (2) identifying those news stories that are the first to discuss a new event occurring in the news; and (3) given a small number of sample news stories about an event, finding all following stories in the stream. The TDT Pilot Study ran from September 1996 through October 1997. The primary participants were DARPA, Carnegie Mellon University, Dragon Systems, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This report summarizes the findings of the pilot study.