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Stack Exchange recently started a collaboration project with the University of Melbourne, in an attempt to improve the automatic detection of duplicate questions.

More information on the project and a call for help from the community can be found here: Project Reduplication of Deduplication Has Begun!

In it, Tim Post mentions that Doris Hoogeveen (me) will post a message on the different meta sites to let you know that we're ready for help. This is it!

As a brief summary, the project is about finding ways to automatically determine if two questions are duplicates, and also to detect the opposite: falsely tagged duplicates. To validate our methods, we need manual judgements from people who really know the data. This is where we need your help. It is impossible to manually annotate all the data from Stack Exchange, and so we have applied several filters to make sure we only show you questions pairs with a high likelihood of being duplicates.

Participation is completely optional, and there's no minimum time requirement. If you are interested in participating in the project, please head over to the annotation interface, which can be found here: http://hum.csse.unimelb.edu.au/se-annotate/ (Note: You need to have a gold badge or more than 3000 reputation points to annotate for this site).

You can log in with your Stack Exchange account, so no sign up is required. The site also contains some more information on the project, which might answer some questions you may have. And I'm also happy to answer them here.

Thank you!

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    I'm not sure how it is on other sites, but tags are very important here for determining dupes. "How do I mine for fish" in game A and "How do I mine for fish" in game B are different questions because they are for different games, and the tags will indicate that. But I don't see any tags in the annotation interface. Is that something you are taking care of in the potential duplicate algorithm? Oct 27, 2016 at 7:23
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    @GodEmperorDune Just had a pair like that: imgur.com/rjLLXUm
    – ave
    Oct 28, 2016 at 11:16
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    Also, "You need to have a gold badge or more than 3000 reputation points to annotate for this site.". Ouch. Don't you think it would be nice to mention that requirement in the post?
    – Dragomok
    Oct 29, 2016 at 6:43
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    @Dragomok It seems that dragonrage edited that in. That requirement is in place as you get close vote permissions on 3000 reputation.
    – ave
    Oct 29, 2016 at 21:50
  • @GodEmperorDune, you have a really good point. I haven't heard people on other site about this, but I definitely see how it would be a good idea to add tags on this one. I'll see what I can do and will get back to you on that. Oct 30, 2016 at 22:22
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    @Dragomok, sorry, it was mention in Tim Post's post, but you're right, maybe I should've added it to mine too. Thank you for showing an interest in helping out though! Oct 30, 2016 at 22:23
  • @GodEmperorDune, I have taken your suggestion on board (plus some other feedback I received) and have changed the annotation interface. It now has tags, directionality for the duplicates, and the option to look at the comments and answers (I left out comments to answers for now though). The annotations done so far have all been saved, so you will still only be presented with pairs you haven't seen to far. Hopefully this will make things easier for you! And I'm still happy to take other feedback of course. Nov 8, 2016 at 5:57
  • @Monozygotic the interface is much, much better now. The tags and other changes make it a lot easier to use.
    – Dragonrage Mod
    Nov 21, 2016 at 19:36
  • @Dragonrage, thanks for the feedback. I'm happy to hear you like it. :) Nov 21, 2016 at 22:13

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The project is drawing to a close, and I am planning to take down the annotation interface this weekend.

Thank you very much to everyone who helped out, and thank you for all the valuable feedback and suggestions. Hopefully the collected annotations will lead to the development of better duplicate question detection systems, especially for StackExchange.

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