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The Past Web pp 225–242Cite as

Automatic Generation of Timelines for Past-Web Events

Abstract

Despite significant advances in web archive infrastructures, the problem of exploring the historical heritage preserved by web archives is yet to be solved. Timeline generation emerges in this context as one possible solution for automatically producing summaries of news over time. Thanks to this, users can gain a better sense of reported news events, entities, stories or topics over time, such as getting a summary of the most important news about a politician, an organisation or a locality. Web archives play an important role here by providing access to a historical set of preserved information. This particular characteristic of web archives makes them an irreplaceable infrastructure and a valuable source of knowledge that contributes to the process of timeline generation. Accordingly, the authors of this chapter developed “Tell me Stories” (http://archive.tellmestories.pt), a news summarisation system, built on top of the infrastructure of Arquivo.pt—the Portuguese web-archive—to automatically generate a timeline summary of a given topic. In this chapter, we begin by providing a brief overview of the most relevant research conducted on the automatic generation of timelines for past-web events. Next, we describe the architecture and some use cases for “Tell me Stories”. Our system demonstrates how web archives can be used as infrastructures to develop innovative services. We conclude this chapter by enumerating open challenges in this field and possible future directions in the general area of temporal summarisation in web archives.

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Acknowledgements

Arian Pasquali and Vítor Mangaravite were financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), within project UIDB/50014/2020. Ricardo Campos and Alípio Jorge were financed by the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) through the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia) within project PTDC/CCI-COM/31857/2017 (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-03185). This funding fits under the research line of the Text2Story project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ci2 – Smart Cities Research Center, Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Tomar, Portugal

    Ricardo Campos

  2. LIAAD – INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal

    Ricardo Campos, Arian Pasquali & Alípio Mário Jorge

  3. Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Adam Jatowt

  4. Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil

    Vítor Mangaravite

  5. DCC – FCUP, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Alípio Mário Jorge

Authors
  1. Ricardo Campos
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  2. Arian Pasquali
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  3. Adam Jatowt
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  4. Vítor Mangaravite
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  5. Alípio Mário Jorge
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Correspondence to Ricardo Campos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Lisbon, Portugal

    Daniel Gomes

  2. Data Science & Intelligent Systems, Computer Science Institute, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Dr. Elena Demidova

  3. School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, UK

    Prof. Jane Winters

  4. University Library J. C. Senckenberg, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Thomas Risse

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Campos, R., Pasquali, A., Jatowt, A., Mangaravite, V., Jorge, A.M. (2021). Automatic Generation of Timelines for Past-Web Events. In: Gomes, D., Demidova, E., Winters, J., Risse, T. (eds) The Past Web. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63291-5_18

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