Timeline extraction using distant supervision and joint inference
Savelie Cornegruta, Andreas G. Vlachos · 2016
In timeline extraction the goal is to order all the events in which a target entity is involved in a timeline.Due to the lack of explicitly annotated data, previous work is primarily rule-based and uses pre-trained temporal linking systems.In this work, we propose a distantly supervised approach by heuristically aligning timelines with documents.The noisy training data created allows us to learn models that anchor events to temporal expressions and entities; during testing, the predictions of these models are combined to produce the timeline.Furthermore, we show how to improve performance using joint inference.In experiments in the SemEval-2015 TimeLine task we show that our distantly supervised approach matches the state-of-the-art performance while joint inference further improves on it by 3.2 F-score points.