With the overwhelming volume of online news available today, there is an increasing need for automatic techniques to analyze and present news to the user in a meaningful and efficient manner. Previous research focused only on organizing news stories by their topics into a flat hierarchy. We believe viewing a news topic as a flat collection of stories is too restrictive and inefficient for a user to understand the topic quickly. In this work, we attempt to capture the rich structure of events and their dependencies in a news topic through our event models. We call the process of recognizing events and their dependencies event threading. We believe our perspective of modeling the structure of a topic is more effective in capturing its semantics than a flat list of on-topic stories. We formally define the novel problem, suggest evaluation metrics and present a few techniques for solving the problem. Besides the standard word based features, our approaches take into account novel features such as temporal locality of stories for event recognition and time-ordering for capturing dependencies. Our experiments on a manually labeled data sets show that our models effectively identify the events and capture dependencies among them.
REF capture the structure of on-line news events that make up different topics and the dependencies among them (i.e., event threading) through different event models.
Event threading within news topics
CIKM '04
Computer Science