Detecting near duplicates
While this chapter is about grouping articles into stories, this first section is all about detecting near duplicates. Before delving into the de-duplication algorithm itself, it is worth introducing the notion of story and de-duplication in the context of news articles. Given two distinct articles - by distinct we mean two different URLs - we may observe the following scenarios:
- The URL of article 1 actually redirects to article 2 or is an extension of the URL provided in article 2 (some additional URL parameters, for instance, or a shortened URL). Both articles with the same content are considered as true duplicates although their URLs are different.
- Both article 1 and article 2 are covering the exact same event, but could have been written by two different publishers. They share lots of content in common, but are not truly similar. Based on certain rules explained hereafter, they might be considered as near-duplicates.
- Both article 1 and article 2 are covering...