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To: J michAel schuLtz <mschultz@UNAGI.CIS.UPENN.EDU>
From: George Doddington <doddington@nist.gov>
Subject: Re: pooled /topic cost
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 17:45:41 -0500

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J michAel schuLtz wrote:

> Can someone verify for me that it is the topic weighted cost that we are
> trying to minimize for the tracking task? As opposed to minimizing the
> story weighted cost.
>
> Mike

This issue remains unresolved. At the September meeting I believe
that the general sentiment was a preference for topic weighted, but
the variable weighting method (footnote 16, pages 13-14 in version
3.7 of the evaluation plan) may prevail. This method uses a variable
weight that tends toward equal story weighting for very small topics
and toward equal topic weighting for very large topics. The nominal
topic size parameter, Nw, which represents the crossover point
between story-weighted and topic-weighted averaging, will likely
be chosen to be the mean (or possibly median) over all topics of
the number of stories per topic.

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On another totally separate point: Please note that (Nt)max will
remain equal to 4 for the formal evaluation, just as for the dry run.
--
George Doddington at NIST: doddington@nist.gov or 301/975-3261

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Last updated Fri Nov 6 15:29:23 1998