Using Temporal Cues for Segmenting Texts into Events

摘要

One of the early application of Information Extraction, motivated by the needs for intelligence tools, is the detection of events in news articles. But this detection may be difficult when news articles mention several occurrences of events of the same kind, which is often done for comparison purposes. We propose in this article new approaches to segment the text of news articles in units relative to only one event, in order to help the identification of relevant information associated with the main event of the news. We present two approaches that use statistical machine learning models (HMM and CRF) exploiting temporal information extracted from the texts as a basis for this segmentation. The evaluation of these approaches in the domain of seismic events show that with a robust and generic approach, we can achieve results at least as good as results obtained with a specialized heuristic approach.