Discovering Typical Histories of Entities by Multi-Timeline Summarization
Yijun Duan, Adam Jatowt, Katsumi Tanaka · 2017
Categorization is a common solution used for organizing entities. For example, there are over 1.13 million categories in Wikipedia which group various types of entities such as persons, locations, etc. What is however often lacking when it comes to understanding categories is a clear information about the common aspects of the entities in a given category, for example, information on their shared histories. We propose in this paper a novel task of automatically creating summaries of typical histories of entities within their categories (e.g., a typical history of a Japanese city). The output summary is in the form of key representative events together with the information on their average dates. We introduce 4 methods for the aforementioned task and evaluate them on Wikipedia categories containing several types of cities and persons. The summaries we generate can provide information on the common evolution of entities falling into the same category as well as they can be compared with the summaries of related categories for providing contrastive type of knowledge.