VLX-Stories: Building an Online Event Knowledge Base with Emerging Entity Detection

Abstract

We present an online multilingual system for event detection and comprehension from media feeds. The system retrieves information from news sites, aggregates them into events (event detection), and summarizes them by extracting semantic labels of its most relevant entities (event representation) in order to answer the journalism Ws: who, what, when and where. The generated events populate VLX-Stories -an event ontology- transforming unstructured text data to a structured knowledge base representation. Our system exploits an external entity Knowledge Graph (VKG) to help populate VLX-Stories. At the same time, this external knowledge graph can also be extended with a Dynamic Entity Linking (DEL) module, which detects emerging entities (EE) on unstructured data. The system is currently deployed in production and used by media producers in the editorial process, providing real-time access to breaking news. Each month, VLX-Stories detects over 9000 events from over 4000 news feeds from seven different countries and in three different languages. At the same time, it detects over 1300 EE per month, which populate VKG.