Multiset Merging: The Majority Rule

摘要

A well known problem that many sources of data nowadays cope with, is the problem of duplicate data. In general, we can represent a data source as a collection of objects. Deduplication then consists of two main problems: (a) finding duplicate objects and (b) processing those duplicate objects. This paper contributes to the study of the latter problem by investigating functions that map a multiset of objects to a single object. Such functions are called merge functions. We investigate the specific case where an object itself is a multiset. An interesting application of this case is the problem of multiple document summarization. Next to the basic definition of such merge functions, we focus on an important property borrowed from the (more general) field of information fusion: the majority rule.