Towards an Evaluation Framework for Topic Extraction Systems for Online Reputation Management

Abstract

This work present a novel evaluation framework for topic extraction over user generated contents. The motivation of this work is the development of systems that monitor the evolution of opinionated top- ics around a certain entity (a person, company or product) in the Web. Currently, due to the effort that would be required to develop a gold standard, topic extraction systems are evaluated qualitatively over cases of study or by means of intrinsic evaluation metrics that can not be applied across heterogeneous systems. We propose evaluation metrics based on available document metadata (link structure and time stamps) which do not require manual annotation of the test corpus. Our preliminary experiments show that these metrics are sensitive to the number of iterations in LDA-based topic extraction algorithms, which is an indication of the consistency of the metrics.

Publication
DyNaK'10 Proceedings of the Workshop on Dynamic Networks and Knowledge Discovery