Toward comprehensive event collections

Abstract

Web archives, such as the Internet Archive, preserve an unprecedented abundance of materials regarding major events and transformations in our society. In this paper, we present an approach for building event-centric sub-collections from such large archives, which includes not only the core documents related to the event itself but, even more importantly, documents describing related aspects (e.g., premises and consequences). This is achieved by identifying relevant concepts and entities from a knowledge base, and then detecting their mentions in documents, which are interpreted as indicators for relevance. We extensively evaluate our system on two diachronic corpora, the New York Times Corpus and the US Congressional Record; additionally, we test its performance on the TREC KBA Stream Corpus and on the TREC-CAR dataset, two publicly available large-scale web collections.