Efficient near duplicate document detection for specialized corpora

Knowledge of near duplicate documents can be adventagous to search engines, even those that only cover a small enterprise or specialized corpus. In this thesis, we investigate improvements to simhash, a signature-based method which can be used to efficiently detect near duplicate documents. We implement simhash in its original form, and demonstrate its effectiveness on a small corpus of newspaper articles, and improve its accuracy through utilizing external metadata and altering its feature selection approach. We also demonstrate the fragility of simhash towards changes in the weighting of features by applying novel changes to the weights. As motivation for performing this near duplicate detection, we discuss the impact it can have on search engines.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Seshasai, Shreyes

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David Spencer and Regina Barzilay.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/53116

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/53116