A Survey of Event Extraction from Text

Abstract

Numerous important events happen everyday and everywhere but are reported in different media sources with different narrative styles. How to detect whether real-world events have been reported in articles and posts is one of the main tasks of event extraction. Other tasks include extracting event arguments and identifying their roles, as well as clustering and tracking similar events from different texts. As one of the most important research themes in natural language processing and understanding, event extraction has a wide range of applications in diverse domains and has been intensively researched for decades. This article provides a comprehensive yet up-to-date survey for event extraction from text. We not only summarize the task definitions, data sources and performance evaluations for event extraction, but also provide a taxonomy for its solution approaches. In each solution group, we provide detailed analysis for the most representative methods, especially their origins, basics, strengths and weaknesses. Last, we also present our envisions about future research directions.