In this paper we present an approach to extract ordered timelines of events, their participants, locations and times from a set of multilingual and cross-lingual data sources. Based on the assumption that event-related information can be recovered from different documents written in different languages, we extend the Cross-document Event Ordering task presented at SemEval 2015 by specifying two new tasks for, respectively, Multilingual and Cross-lingual Timeline Extraction. We then develop three deterministic algorithms for timeline extraction based on two main ideas. First, we address implicit temporal relations at document level since explicit time-anchors are too scarce to build a wide coverage timeline extraction system. Second, we leverage several multilingual resources to obtain a single, inter-operable, semantic representation of events across documents and across languages. The result is a highly competitive system that strongly outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Nonetheless, further analysis of the results reveals that linking the event mentions with their target entities and time-anchors remains a difficult challenge. The systems, resources and scorers are freely available to facilitate its use and guarantee the reproducibility of results.
Compared to previous works on Track A of the SemEval 2015 Timeline extraction task, our approach differs in several important ways. Firstly, it addresses the extraction of implicit information to provide a better time-anchoring . More specifically, we are inspired by recent works on Implicit Semantic Role Labelling (ISRL) and, specially, on @cite_11 who adapted ISRL to focus on modifiers, including temporal arguments, instead of core arguments or roles. Given that not training data is provided, we developed a deterministic algorithm for timeline extraction loosely inspired by @cite_4 . Secondly, we extend the monolingual approach to make it multi- and cross-lingual, which constitutes a novel system on its own. Finally, our approach outperforms every other previous approach on the task, almost doubling the score of the next best system.
@cite_4 @cite_11
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This paper describes the system SPINOZA VU developed for the SemEval 2015 Task 4: Cross Document TimeLines. The system integrates output from the NewsReader Natural Language Processing pipeline and is designed following an entity based model. The poor performance of the submitted runs are mainly a consequence of error propagation. Nevertheless, the error analysis has shown that the interpretation module behind the system performs correctly. An out of competition version of the system has fixed some errors and obtained competitive results. Therefore, we consider the system an important step towards a more complex task such as storyline extraction. This paper describes our system for Task 11 of SemEval-2013. In the task, participants are provided with a set of ambiguous search queries and the snippets returned by a search engine, and are asked to associate senses with the snippets. The snippets are then clustered using the sense assignments and systems are evaluated based on the quality of the snippet clusters. Our system adopts a preexisting Word Sense Induction (WSI) methodology based on Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), a non-parametric topic model. Our system is trained over extracts from the full text of English Wikipedia, and is shown to perform well in the shared task. Extracting temporal information from raw text is fundamental for deep language understanding, and key to many applications like question answering, information extraction, and document summarization. In this paper, we describe two systems we submitted to the TempEval 2 challenge, for extracting temporal information from raw text. The systems use a combination of deep semantic parsing, Markov Logic Networks and Conditional Random Field classifiers. Our two submitted systems, TRIPS and TRIOS, approached all tasks and outperformed all teams in two tasks. Furthermore, TRIOS mostly had second-best performances in other tasks. TRIOS also outperformed the other teams that attempted all the tasks. Our system is notable in that for tasks C -- F, they operated on raw text while all other systems used tagged events and temporal expressions in the corpus as input. This paper presents our contribution to the SemEval-2015 Task 7. The task was subdivided into three subtasks that consisted of automatically identifying the time period when a piece of news was written (1,2) as well as automatically determining whether a specific phrase in a sentence is relevant or not for a given period of time (3). Our system tackles the resolution of all three subtasks. With this purpose in mind multiple approaches are undertaken that use resources such as Wikipedia or Google NGrams. Final results are obtained by combining the output from all approaches. The texts used for the task are written in English and range from the years 1700 to 2000.