This paper presents a generic approach to content selection for creating timelines from individual history articles for which no external information about the same topic is available. This scenario is in contrast to existing works on timeline generation, which require the presence of a large corpus of news articles. To identify salient events in a given history article, we exploit lexical cues about the article's subject area, as well as time expressions that are syntactically attached to an event word. We also test different methods of ensuring timeline coverage of the entire historical time span described. Our best-performing method outperforms a new unsupervised base-line and an improved version of an existing supervised approach. We see our work as a step towards more semantically motivated approaches to single-document summarisation.

People commonly need to purchase things in person, from large garden supplies to home decor. Although modern search systems are very effective at finding online products, little research attention has been paid to helping users find places that sell a specific product offline. For instance, users searching for an apron are not typically directed to a nearby kitchen store by a standard search engine. In this paper, we investigate "where can I buy"-style queries related to in-person purchases of products and services. Answering these queries is challenging since little is known about the range of products sold in many stores, especially those which are smaller in size. To better understand this class of queries, we first present an in-depth analysis of typical offline purchase needs as observed by a major search engine, producing an ontology of such needs. We then propose ranking features for this new problem, and learn a ranking function that returns stores most likely to sell a queried item or service, even if there is very little information available online about some of the stores. Our final contribution is a new evaluation framework that combines distance with store relevance in measuring the effectiveness of such a search system. We evaluate our method using this approach and show that it outperforms a modern web search engine.