Detecting and Browsing Events in Unstructured text
David A. Smith · 2002
Previews and overviews of large, heterogeneous information resources help users comprehend the scope of collections and focus on particular subsets of interest. For narrative docu-ments, questions of “what happened? where? and when?” are natural points of entry. Building on our earlier work at the Perseus Project with detecting terms, place names, and dates, we have exploited co-occurrences of dates and place names to detect and describe likely events in document col-lections. We compare statistical measures for determining the relative significance of various events. We have built in-terfaces that help users preview likely regions of interest for a given range of space and time by plotting the distribution and relevance of various collocations. Users can also control the amount of collocation information in each view. Once particular collocations are selected, the system can identify key phrases associated with each possible event to organize browsing of the documents themselves.