Detecting Salient Events in Large Corpora by a Combination of NLP and Data Mining Techniques

Detección de destacados eventos en un corpus grande combinando técnicas para PLN y minería de datos

Delphine Battistelli¹, Thierry Charnois², Jean-Luc Minel³, and Charles Teissèdre⁴

¹ STIH, Université Paris Sorbonne, France delphine.battistelli@paris-sorbonne.fr

³ GREYC, Université de Caen, France ean-luc.minel@u-paris10.fr

⁴ STIH, Université Paris Sorbonne, France charles.teissedre@gmail.com

Article received on 05/12/2012
Accepted on 17/01/2013.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a framework and a system that extracts "salient" events relevant to a query from a large collection of documents, and which also enables events to be placed along a timeline. Each event is represented by a sentence extracted from the collection. We have conducted some experiments showing the interest of the method for this issue. Our method is based on a combination of linguistic modeling (concerning temporal adverbial meanings), symbolic natural language processing techniques (using cascades of morpho-lexical transducers) and data mining techniques (namely, sequential pattern mining under constraints). The system was applied to a corpus of newswires in French provided by the Agence France Presse (AFP). Evaluation was performed in partnership with French newswire agency journalists.

Keywords: Dates, temporal adverbials, event extraction, sequential pattern.

Resumen

En este trabajo se presenta el marco y el sistema para extracción de los eventos "destacados" relevantes a una pregunta de una gran colección de documentos, el cual también permite ubicar los eventos a lo largo de la línea de tiempo. Cada evento se representa por una frase extraída de la colección. Se han realizado unos experimentos que muestran el interés del método para este problema. El método propuesto se basa en la combinación del modelado lingüístico (con respecto a significados adverbiales temporales), las técnicas simbólicas de procesamiento de lenguaje natural (usando cascadas de transductores morfo-léxicos) y técnicas de minería de datos (la minería de patrones secuenciales bajo restricciones). El sistema ha sido aplicado a un corpus de noticias en idioma francés proporcionado por la Agencia France Presse (AFP). La evaluación se realizó en colaboración con periodistas de agencias francesas de noticias.

Palabras clave: Fechas, adverbiales temporales, extracción de eventos, patrón secuencial.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by ANR Chronolines and Ecos-Sud 28 80.

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