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Main Authors: Rangreji, Sandesh S, Zhong, Mian, Field, Anjalie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12099
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author Rangreji, Sandesh S
Zhong, Mian
Field, Anjalie
author_facet Rangreji, Sandesh S
Zhong, Mian
Field, Anjalie
contents Analyses of document collections often require selecting what data to analyze, as not all documents are relevant to a particular research question and computational constraints preclude analyzing all documents, yet little work has examined effects of selection strategy choices. We systematically evaluate seven selection methods (from random selection to hybrid retrieval) on outputs from four text analyses methods (LDA, BERTopic, TopicGPT, HiCode) over two datasets with 26 open-ended queries. Our evaluation reveals practice guidance: semantic or hybrid retrieval offer strong go-to approaches that avoid the pitfalls of weaker selection strategies and the unnecessary compute overhead of more complicated ones. Overall, our evaluation framework establishes data selection as a methodological decision, rather than a practical necessity, inviting the development of new strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_12099
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Effect of Document Selection on Query-focused Text Analysis
Rangreji, Sandesh S
Zhong, Mian
Field, Anjalie
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Analyses of document collections often require selecting what data to analyze, as not all documents are relevant to a particular research question and computational constraints preclude analyzing all documents, yet little work has examined effects of selection strategy choices. We systematically evaluate seven selection methods (from random selection to hybrid retrieval) on outputs from four text analyses methods (LDA, BERTopic, TopicGPT, HiCode) over two datasets with 26 open-ended queries. Our evaluation reveals practice guidance: semantic or hybrid retrieval offer strong go-to approaches that avoid the pitfalls of weaker selection strategies and the unnecessary compute overhead of more complicated ones. Overall, our evaluation framework establishes data selection as a methodological decision, rather than a practical necessity, inviting the development of new strategies.
title The Effect of Document Selection on Query-focused Text Analysis
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12099