Cumulative Citation Recommendation: Classification vs. Ranking

Cumulative citation recommendation refers to the task of filtering a time-ordered corpus for documents that are highly relevant to a pre-defined set of entities. This task has been introduced at the TREC Knowledge Base Acceleration track in 2012, where two main families of approaches emerged: classification and ranking. In this paper we perform an experimental comparison of these two strategies using supervised learning with a rich feature set. Our main finding is that ranking outperforms classification on all evaluation settings and metrics. Our analysis also reveals that a ranking-based approach has more potential for future improvements.