Graph-Based text Representation for Novelty Detection

We discuss several feature sets for novelty detection at the sentence level, using the data and procedure established in task 2 of the TREC 2004 novelty track. In particular, we investigate feature sets derived from graph representations of sentences and sets of sentences. We show that a highly connected graph produced by using sentence-level term distances and pointwise mutual information can serve as a source to extract features for novelty detection. We compare several feature sets based on such a graph representation. These feature sets allow us to increase the accuracy of an initial novelty classifier which is based on a bag-of-word representation and KL divergence. The final result ties with the best system at TREC 2004.