A systematic study of parameter correlations in large scale duplicate document detection

Although much work has been done on duplicate document detection (DDD) and its applications, we observe the absence of a systematic study of the performance and scalability of large-scale DDD. It is still unclear how various parameters of DDD, such as similarity threshold, precision/recall requirement, sampling ratio, document size, correlate mutually. In this paper, correlations among several most important parameters of DDD are studied and the impact of sampling ratio is of most interest since it heavily affects the accuracy and scalability of DDD algorithms. An empirical analysis is conducted on a million documents from the TREC .GOV collection. Experimental results show that even using the same sampling ratio, the precision of DDD varies greatly on documents with different size. Based on this observation, an adaptive sampling strategy for DDD is proposed, which minimizes the sampling ratio within the constraint of a given precision threshold. We believe the insights from our analysis are helpful for guiding the future large scale DDD work.