Our study identifies sentences in Wikipedia articles that are either identical or highly similar by applying techniques for near-duplicate detection of web pages. This is accomplished with a MapReduce implementation of minhash to identify clusters of sentences with high Jaccard similarity. We show that these clusters can be categorized into six different types, two of which are particularly interesting: identical sentences quantify the extent to which content in Wikipedia is copied and pasted, and near-duplicate sentences that state contradictory facts point to quality issues in Wikipedia.
Other similar formulations of the problem are what the data mining community calls pairwise similarity search or all pairs'' search @cite_0 and what the database community calls set similarity join @cite_7 . The task is the same: given a potentially large collection of objects, identify all pairs whose similarity is above a threshold according to some similarity metric.
@cite_0 @cite_7
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The all-pairs-similarity-search (or similarity join) problem has been extensively studied for text and a handful of other datatypes. However, surprisingly little progress has been made on similarity joins for time series subsequences. The lack of progress probably stems from the daunting nature of the problem. For even modest sized datasets the obvious nested-loop algorithm can take months, and the typical speed-up techniques in this domain (i.e., indexing, lower-bounding, triangular-inequality pruning and early abandoning) at best produce one or two orders of magnitude speedup. In this work we introduce a novel scalable algorithm for time series subsequence all-pairs-similarity-search. For exceptionally large datasets, the algorithm can be trivially cast as an anytime algorithm and produce high-quality approximate solutions in reasonable time. The exact similarity join algorithm computes the answer to the time series motif and time series discord problem as a side-effect, and our algorithm incidentally provides the fastest known algorithm for both these extensively-studied problems. We demonstrate the utility of our ideas for two time series data mining problems, including motif discovery and novelty discovery. Exact set similarity join, which finds all the similar set pairs from two collections of sets, is a fundamental problem with a wide range of applications. The existing solutions for set similarity join follow a filtering-verification framework, which generates a list of candidate pairs through scanning indexes in the filtering phase, and reports those similar pairs in the verification phase. Though much research has been conducted on this problem, set relations, which we find out is quite effective on improving the algorithm efficiency through computational cost sharing, have never been studied. Therefore, in this paper, instead of considering each set individually, we explore the set relations in different levels to reduce the overall computational costs. First, it has been shown that most of the computational time is spent on the filtering phase, which can be quadratic to the number of sets in the worst case for the existing solutions. Thus we explore index-level set relations to reduce the filtering cost to be linear to the size of the input while keeping the same filtering power. We achieve this by grouping related sets into blocks in the index and skipping useless index probes in joins. Second, we explore answer-level set relations to further improve the algorithm based on the intuition that if two sets are similar, their answers may have a large overlap. We derive an algorithm which incrementally generates the answer of one set from an already computed answer of another similar set rather than compute the answer from scratch to reduce the computational cost. Finally, we conduct extensive performance studies using 21 real datasets with various data properties from a wide range of domains. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms all the existing algorithms across all datasets and can achieve more than an order of magnitude speedup against the state- of-the-art algorithms. The research challenge addressed in this paper is to devise effective techniques for identifying task-based sessions, i.e. sets of possibly non contiguous queries issued by the user of a Web Search Engine for carrying out a given task. In order to evaluate and compare different approaches, we built, by means of a manual labeling process, a ground-truth where the queries of a given query log have been grouped in tasks. Our analysis of this ground-truth shows that users tend to perform more than one task at the same time, since about 75 of the submitted queries involve a multi-tasking activity. We formally define the Task-based Session Discovery Problem (TSDP) as the problem of best approximating the manually annotated tasks, and we propose several variants of well known clustering algorithms, as well as a novel efficient heuristic algorithm, specifically tuned for solving the TSDP. These algorithms also exploit the collaborative knowledge collected by Wiktionary and Wikipedia for detecting query pairs that are not similar from a lexical content point of view, but actually semantically related. The proposed algorithms have been evaluated on the above ground-truth, and are shown to perform better than state-of-the-art approaches, because they effectively take into account the multi-tasking behavior of users. In this paper, we define and study a novel text mining problem, which we refer to as Comparative Text Mining (CTM). Given a set of comparable text collections, the task of comparative text mining is to discover any latent common themes across all collections as well as summarize the similarity and differences of these collections along each common theme. This general problem subsumes many interesting applications, including business intelligence and opinion summarization. We propose a generative probabilistic mixture model for comparative text mining. The model simultaneously performs cross-collection clustering and within-collection clustering, and can be applied to an arbitrary set of comparable text collections. The model can be estimated efficiently using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. We evaluate the model on two different text data sets (i.e., a news article data set and a laptop review data set), and compare it with a baseline clustering method also based on a mixture model. Experiment results show that the model is quite effective in discovering the latent common themes across collections and performs significantly better than our baseline mixture model.