Using Learning-based Filters to Detect Rule-based Filtering Obsolescence

For years, Caisse des Depots et Consignations has produced information filtering applications. To be operational, these applications require high filtering performances which are achieved by using rule-based filters. With this technique, an administrator has to tune a set of rules for each topic. However, filters become obsolescent over time. The decrease of their performances is due to diachronic polysemy of terms that involves a loss of precision and to diachronic polymorphism of concepts that involves a loss of recall. To help the administrator to maintain his filters, we have developed a method which automatically detects filtering obsolescence. It consists in making a learning-based control filter using a set of documents which have already been categorised as relevant or not relevant by the rule-based filter. The idea is to supervise this filter by processing a differential comparison of its outcomes with those of the control one. This method has many advantages. It is simple to implement since the training set used by the learning is supplied by the rule-based filter. Thus, both the making and the use of the control filter are fully automatic. With automatic detection of obsolescence, learning-based filtering finds a rich application which offers interesting prospects.