Detecting and Browsing Events in Unstructured text

ABSTRACT

Previews and overviews of large, heterogeneous information resources help users comprehend the scope of collections and focus on particular subsets of interest. For narrative documents, questions of "what happened? where? and when?" are natural points of entry. Building on our earlier work at the Perseus Project with detecting terms, place names, and dates, we have exploited co-occurrences of dates and place names to detect and describe likely events in document collections. We compare statistical measures for determining the relative significance of various events. We have built interfaces that help users preview likely regions of interest for a given range of space and time by plotting the distribution and relevance of various collocations. Users can also control the amount of collocation information in each view. Once particular collocations are selected, the system can identify key phrases associated with each possible event to organize browsing of the documents themselves.

REFERENCES

• 1: Donna Bergmark , Carl Lagoze, An Architecture for Automatic Reference Linking, Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.115-126, September 04-09, 2001
• 2: Kenneth Ward Church , Patrick Hanks, Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography, Computational Linguistics, v.16 n.1, p.22-29, March 1990
• 3: Gregory Crane , David A. Smith , Clifford E. Wulfman, Building a hypertextual digital library in the humanities: a case study on London, Proceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, p.426-434, January 2001, Roanoke, Virginia, United States [doi>10.1145/379437.379756]
• 4: Gregory Crane , Robert F. Chavez , Anne Mahoney , Thomas L. Milbank , Jeffrey A. Rydberg-Cox , David A. Smith , Clifford E. Wulfman, Drudgery and deep thought, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.5, p.34-40, May 2001 [doi>10.1145/374308.374333]
• 5: Ted Dunning, Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence, Computational Linguistics, v.19 n.1, March 1993
• 6: Frederick H. Dyer. A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion. Thomas Yoseloff, New York, repr. of 1908 edition, 1959.
• 7: Stephan Greene , Gary Marchionini , Catherine Plaisant , Ben Shneiderman, Previews and overviews in digital libraries: designing surrogates to support visual information seeking, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, v.51 n.4, p.380-393, March 1, 2000 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(2000)51:4<380::AID-ASI7>3.3.CO;2-X]
• 8: Marti A. Hearst , Jan O. Pedersen, Reexamining the cluster hypothesis: scatter/gather on retrieval results, Proceedings of the 19th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.76-84, August 18-22, 1996, Zurich, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/243199.243216]
• 9: Marti A. Hearst , Christian Plaunt, Subtopic structuring for full-length document access, Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.59-68, June 27-July 01, 1993, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/160688.160695]
• 10: Vikash Khandelwal , Rahul Gupta , James Allan, An evaluation corpus for temporal summarization, Proceedings of the first international conference on Human language technology research, p.1-5, March 18-21, 2001, San Diego [doi>10.3115/1072133.1072174]
• 11: Anton Leuski, Evaluating document clustering for interactive information retrieval, Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management, October 05-10, 2001, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/502585.502592]
• 12: Kevin S. McCurley, Geospatial mapping and navigation of the web, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide Web, p.221-229, May 01-05, 2001, Hong Kong, Hong Kong [doi>10.1145/371920.372056]
• 13: Dana McKay and Sally Jo Cunningham. Mining dates from historical documents. Technical report, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, 2000.
• 14: Gerard Salton , Amit Singhal , Mandar Mitra , Chris Buckley, Automatic text structuring and summarization, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.33 n.2, p.193-207, March 1997 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(96)00062-3]
• 15: David A. Smith , Gregory Crane, Disambiguating Geographic Names in a Historical Digital Library, Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.127-136, September 04-09, 2001
• 16: Russell Swan , James Allan, Extracting significant time varying features from text, Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Information and knowledge management, p.38-45, November 02-06, 1999, Kansas City, Missouri, United States [doi>10.1145/319950.319956]
• 17: Russell Swan , James Allan, Automatic generation of overview timelines, Proceedings of the 23rd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.49-56, July 24-28, 2000, Athens, Greece [doi>10.1145/345508.345546]
• 18: Charles L. Wayne. Multilingual topic detection and tracking: Successful research enabled by corpora and evaluation. In LREC 2000: 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Athens, Greece, June 2000.
• 19: Yiming Yang , Tom Pierce , Jaime Carbonell, A study of retrospective and on-line event detection, Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.28-36, August 24-28, 1998, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/290941.290953]
• 20: Oren Zamir, Oren Etzioni, Omid Madani, and Richard M. Karp. Fast and intuitive clustering of web documents. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGKDD Conference, 1997.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
information extraction, interactive IR, visualization