METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR TRACKING THE PROVENANCE OF INFORMATION

A method for determining a flow of information within a plurality of documents is provided. The method may include receiving the plurality of documents with each document having document content and a document timestamp. Based on the documents, the method may include constructing an inferred document causality forest by determining causal edges of the inferred document causality forest based on the document contents and the document timestamps. The inferred document causality forest may indicate a temporal flow of information from at least one earliest causal document of the plurality of documents. Further, each causal edge may extend from a node for an antecedent document to a node for a subsequent document that has a similarity above a similarity threshold and a document timestamp of the antecedent document may be earlier in time than a document timestamp of the subsequent document.