Source Retrieval 2014

Synopsis

  • Task: Given a suspicious document and a web search API, your task is to retrieve all plagiarized sources while minimizing retrieval costs.
  • Input: [data]
  • Baseline: [code]
  • Submission: [submit]

Input

To develop your software, we provide you with a training corpus that consists of suspicious documents. Each suspicious document is about a specific topic and may consist of plagiarized passages obtained from web pages on that topic found in the ClueWeb09 corpus.

API

If you are not in possession of the ClueWeb09 corpus, we also provide access to two search engines which index the ClueWeb, namely the Lemur Indri search engine and the ChatNoir search engine. To programmatically access these two search engines, we provide a unified search API.

Note: To better separate the source retrieval task from the text alignment task, the API provides a text alignment oracle feature. For each document you request to download from the ClueWeb, the text alignment oracle discloses if this document is a source for plagiarism for the suspicious document in question. In addition, the plagiarized text is returned. This, way participation in the source retrieval task does not require the development of a text alignment solution. However, you are free to use your own text alignment, if you want to.

Output

For each suspicious document suspicious-documentXYZ.txt found in the evaluation corpora, your plagiarism detector shall output an interaction log suspicious-documentXYZ.log which logs meta information about your retrieval process:

Timestamp   [Query|Download_URL]

1358326592  barack obama family tree

1358326597  http://webis14.medien.uni-weimar.de/proxy/clueweb/id/110212744

1358326598  http://webis14.medien.uni-weimar.de/proxy/clueweb/id/10221241

1358326599  http://webis14.medien.uni-weimar.de/proxy/clueweb/id/100003305377

1358326605  barack obama genealogy

1358326610  http://webis14.medien.uni-weimar.de/proxy/clueweb/id/82208332

...

For example, the above file would specify that at 1358326592 (Unix timestamp) the query barack obama family tree was sent and that in the following three of the retrieved documents were selected for download before the next query was sent.

Evaluation

Performance will be measured based on the following five scores as averages over each suspicious document:

  1. Number of queries submitted.
  2. Number of web pages downloaded.
  3. Precision and recall of web pages downloaded regarding actual sources of a suspicious document.
  4. Number of queries until the first actual source is found.
  5. Number of downloads until the first actual source is downloaded.

Measures 1-3 capture the overall behavior of a system and measures 4-5 assess the time to first result. The quality of identifying reused passages between documents is not taken into account here, but note that retrieving duplicates of a source document is considered a true positive, whereas retrieving more than one duplicate of a source document does not improve performance.

Baseline

For your convenience, we provide a baseline program written in Python. The program loops through the suspicious documents in a given directory and outputs a search interaction log. The log is valid with respect to the output format described below. You may use the source code for getting started with your own approach.

Task Committee