DETECTING NEW AND EMERGING EVENTS IN STREAMING NEWS DOCUMENTS
Kirk E Roberts, Sanda M. Harabagiu · International Journal of Semantic Computing · 2011
Recognizing new and emerging events in a stream of news documents requires understanding the semantic structure of news reported in natural language. New event detection (NED) is the task of recognizing when a news document discusses a completely novel event. To be successful at this task, we believe a NED method must extract and represent four principal components of an event: its type, participants, temporal, and spatial properties. These components must then be compared in a semantically robust manner to detect novelty. We further propose event centrality, a method for determining the most important participants in an event. Our NED methods produce a 29% cost reduction over a bag-of-words baseline and a 17% cost reduction over an existing state-of-the-art approach. Additionally, we discuss our method for recognizing emerging events: the tracking and categorization of unexpected or novel events.