Event Models for Historical Perspectives: Determining Relations between High and Low Level Events in Text, Based on the Classification of Time, Location and Participants.

Agata Cybulska, Piek Vossen


Abstract
In this paper, we report on a study that was performed within the “Semantics of History” project on how descriptions of historical events are realized in different types of text and what the implications are for modeling the event information. We believe that different historical perspectives of writers correspond in some degree with genre distinction and correlate with variation in language use. To capture differences between event representations in diverse text types and thus to identify relations between historical events, we defined an event model. We observed clear relations between particular parts of event descriptions - actors, time and location modifiers. Texts, written shortly after an event happened, use more specific and uniquely occurring event descriptions than texts describing the same events but written from a longer time perspective. We carried out some statistical corpus research to confirm this hypothesis. The ability to automatically determine relations between historical events and their sub-events over textual data, based on the relations between event participants, time markers and locations, will have important repercussions for the design of historical information retrieval systems.
Anthology ID:
L10-1138
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/205_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Agata Cybulska and Piek Vossen. 2010. Event Models for Historical Perspectives: Determining Relations between High and Low Level Events in Text, Based on the Classification of Time, Location and Participants.. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Event Models for Historical Perspectives: Determining Relations between High and Low Level Events in Text, Based on the Classification of Time, Location and Participants. (Cybulska & Vossen, LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/205_Paper.pdf