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Identity and Granularity of Events in Text

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Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9624))

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Abstract

In this paper we describe a method to detect event descriptions in different news articles and to model the semantics of events and their components using RDF representations. We compare these descriptions to solve a cross-document event coreference task. Our component approach to event semantics defines identity and granularity of events at different levels. It performs close to state-of-the-art approaches on the cross-document event coreference task, while outperforming other works when assuming similar quality of event detection. We demonstrate how granularity and identity are interconnected and we discuss how semantic anomaly could be used to define differences between coreference, subevent and topical relations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.nltk.org/modules/nltk/stem/wordnet.html.

  2. 2.

    http://nltk.org/_modules/nltk/corpus/reader/wordnet.html.

  3. 3.

    www.newsreader-project.eu.

  4. 4.

    We used FrameNet frame elements to decide on relevance of a participant.

  5. 5.

    WordNet synsets are represented here as Inter Lingual Index (ili) records: www.globalwordnet.org/ili [33]. This enables us to compare events across different languages [32].

  6. 6.

    The reason that NWR-G is not 100% is because the NewsReader system could not process one of the evaluation files due to formatting problems.

  7. 7.

    We left out the document creation time as a baseline time-anchor because it may interfer with the task since the articles on each seminal event were published on different dates.

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Acknowledgments

The NewsReader project was co-funded by the European Union as project number: 316404, FP7 Work Programme Call FP7-ICT-2011-8 Objective Cooperation Research theme “Information and Communication Technologies”, challenge 4.4 - Area Intelligent Information Management.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computational Lexicology and Terminology Lab, Faculty of Humanities, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081HV, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Piek Vossen & Agata Cybulska

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  1. Piek Vossen
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  2. Agata Cybulska
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Correspondence to Piek Vossen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CIC, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico City, Mexico

    Alexander Gelbukh

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Vossen, P., Cybulska, A. (2018). Identity and Granularity of Events in Text. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9624. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75487-1_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75487-1_39

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