In this article, I present the questions that I seek to answer in my PhD research. I posit to analyze natural language text with the help of semantic annotations and mine important events for navigating large text corpora. Semantic annotations such as named entities, geographic locations, and temporal expressions can help us mine events from the given corpora. These events thus provide us with useful means to discover the locked knowledge in them. I pose three problems that can help unlock this knowledge vault in semantically annotated text corpora: i. identifying important events; ii. semantic search; iii. and event analytics.
. Researchers have considered only temporal annotations in text corpora to improve retrieval effectiveness by analyzing the time sensitivity of keyword queries and incorporating the time dimension in retrieval models. Some methods of analysis of time-sensitive queries rely on publication dates of documents @cite_1 @cite_9 , while others also look at the temporal expressions in document contents @cite_15 . Several works also take into account the time dimension for re-ranking documents @cite_5 and diversifying them along time @cite_8 @cite_30 . One of the seminal works in extracting temporal events was by Ling and Weld @cite_23 . They outline a probabilistic model to solve the problem of extracting relations from text with temporal constraints.
@cite_30 @cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_23 @cite_5 @cite_15
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Search result diversification is a common technique for tackling the problem of ambiguous and multi-faceted queries by maximizing query aspects or subtopics in a result list. In some special cases, subtopics associated to such queries can be temporally ambiguous, for instance, the query US Open is more likely to be targeting the tennis open in September, and the golf tournament in June. More precisely, users' search intent can be identified by the popularity of a subtopic with respect to the time where the query is issued. In this paper, we study search result diversification for time-sensitive queries, where the temporal dynamics of query subtopics are explicitly determined and modeled into result diversification. Unlike aforementioned work that, in general, considered only static subtopics, we leverage dynamic subtopics by analyzing two data sources i.e., query logs and a document collection. By using these data sources, it provides the insights from different perspectives of how query subtopics change over time. Moreover, we propose novel time-aware diversification methods that leverage the identified dynamic subtopics. A key idea is to re-rank search results based on the freshness and popularity of subtopics. To this end, our experimental results show that the proposed methods can significantly improve the diversity and relevance effectiveness for time-sensitive queries in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. Recent work on analyzing query logs shows that a significant fraction of queries are temporal, i.e., relevancy is dependent on time, and temporal queries play an important role in many domains, e.g., digital libraries and document archives. Temporal queries can be divided into two types: 1) those with temporal criteria explicitly provided by users, and 2) those with no temporal criteria provided. In this paper, we deal with the latter type of queries, i.e., queries that comprise only keywords, and their relevant documents are associated to particular time periods not given by the queries. We propose a number of methods to determine the time of queries using temporal language models. After that, we show how to increase the retrieval effectiveness by using the determined time of queries to re-rank the search results. Through extensive experiments we show that our proposed approaches improve retrieval effectiveness. Documents with timestamps, such as email and news, can be placed along a timeline. The timeline for a set of documents returned in response to a query gives an indication of how documents relevant to that query are distributed in time. Examining the timeline of a query result set allows us to characterize both how temporally dependent the topic is, as well as how relevant the results are likely to be. We outline characteristic patterns in query result set timelines, and show experimentally that we can automatically classify documents into these classes. We also show that properties of the query result set timeline can help predict the mean average precision of a query. These results show that meta-features associated with a query can be combined with text retrieval techniques to improve our understanding and treatment of text search on documents with timestamps. Research on information extraction (IE) seeks to distill relational tuples from natural language text, such as the contents of the WWW. Most IE work has focussed on identifying static facts, encoding them as binary relations. This is unfortunate, because the vast majority of facts are fluents, only holding true during an interval of time. It is less helpful to extract PresidentOf(Bill-Clinton, USA) without the temporal scope 1 20 93 - 1 20 01. This paper presents TIE, a novel, information-extraction system, which distills facts from text while inducing as much temporal information as possible. In addition to recognizing temporal relations between times and events, TIE performs global inference, enforcing transitivity to bound the start and ending times for each event. We introduce the notion of temporal entropy as a way to evaluate the performance of temporal IE systems and present experiments showing that TIE outperforms three alternative approaches. This work addresses information needs that have a temporal dimension conveyed by a temporal expression in the user’s query. Temporal expressions such as “in the 1990s” are frequent, easily extractable, but not leveraged by existing retrieval models. One challenge when dealing with them is their inherent uncertainty. It is often unclear which exact time interval a temporal expression refers to. We integrate temporal expressions into a language modeling approach, thus making them first-class citizens of the retrieval model and considering their inherent uncertainty. Experiments on the New York Times Annotated Corpus using Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect queries and obtain relevance assessments demonstrate that our approach yields substantial improvements in retrieval effectiveness.