In this paper, we investigate the interactions between topic persons to help readers construct the background knowledge of a topic. We proposed a rich interactive tree structure to represent syntactic, context, and semantic information of text, and this structure is incorporated into a tree-based convolution kernel to identify segments that convey person interactions and further construct person interaction networks. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in detecting and extracting the interactions between topic persons in the text, and outperforms other extraction approaches used for comparison. Furthermore, readers will be able to easily navigate through the topic persons of interest within the interaction networks, and further construct the background knowledge of the topic to facilitate comprehension.

Discovering the interactions between the persons mentioned in a set of topic documents can help readers construct the background of the topic and facilitate document comprehension. To discover person interactions, we need a detection method that can identify text segments containing information about the interactions. Information extraction algorithms then analyze the segments to extract interaction tuples and construct a network of person interaction. In this article, we define interaction detection as a classification problem. The proposed interaction detection method, called feature‐based interactive segment recognizer (FISER), exploits 19 features covering syntactic, context‐dependent, and semantic information in text to detect intra‐clausal and inter‐clausal interactive segments in topic documents. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FISER outperformed many well‐known relation extraction and protein–protein interaction detection methods on identifying interactive segments in topic documents. In addition, the precision, recall, and F1‐score of the best feature combination are 72.9%, 55.8%, and 63.2%, respectively.

The development of a topic in a set of topic documents is constituted by a series of person interactions at a specific time and place. Knowing the interactions of the persons mentioned in these documents is helpful for readers to better comprehend the documents. In this paper, we propose a topic person interaction detection method called SPIRIT, which classifies the text segments in a set of topic documents that convey person interactions. We design the rich interactive tree structure to represent syntactic, context, and semantic information of text, and this structure is incorporated into a tree-based convolution kernel to identify interactive segments. Experiment results based on real world topics demonstrate that the proposed rich interactive tree structure effectively detects the topic person interactions and that our method outperforms many well-known relation extraction and protein-protein interaction methods.

A topic is defined as a seminal event or activity along with all directly related events and activities. It is represented by a chronological sequence of documents published by different authors on the Internet. In this study, we define a task called topic anatomy, which summarizes and associates the core parts of a topic temporally so that readers can understand the content easily. The proposed topic anatomy model, called TSCAN, derives the major themes of a topic from the eigenvectors of a temporal block association matrix. Then, the significant events of the themes and their summaries are extracted by examining the constitution of the eigenvectors. Finally, the extracted events are associated through their temporal closeness and context similarity to form an evolution graph of the topic. Experiments based on the official TDT4 corpus demonstrate that the generated temporal summaries present the storylines of topics in a comprehensible form. Moreover, in terms of content coverage, coherence, and consistency, the summaries are superior to those derived by existing summarization methods based on human-composed reference summaries.

A topic is usually associated with a specific time, place, and person(s). Generally, topics that involve bipolar or competing viewpoints are attention getting and are thus reported in a large number of documents. Identifying the association between important persons mentioned in numerous topic documents would help readers comprehend topics more easily. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach for identifying bipolar person names in a set of topic documents. Specifically, we employ principal component analysis (PCA) to discover bipolar word usage patterns of person names in the documents, and show that the signs of the entries in the principal eigenvector of PCA partition the person names into bipolar groups spontaneously. To reduce the effect of data sparseness, we introduce two techniques, called the weighted correlation coefficient and off-topic block elimination. We also present a timeline system that shows the intensity and activeness development of the identified bipolar person groups. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in identifying bipolar person names in topic documents, while the generated timelines provide comprehensive storylines of topics.

When an event occurs, it attracts attention of information sources to publish related documents along its lifespan. The task of event detection is to automatically identify events and their related documents from a document stream, which is a set of chronologically ordered documents collected from various information sources. Generally, each event has a distinct activeness development so that its status changes continuously during its lifespan. When an event is active, there are a lot of related documents from various information sources. In contrast when it is inactive, there are very few documents, but they are focused. Previous works on event detection did not consider the characteristics of the event's activeness, and used rigid thresholds for event detection. We propose a concept called life profile, modeled by a hidden Markov model, to model the activeness trends of events. In addition, a general event detection framework, LIPED, which utilizes the learned life profiles and the burst-and-diverse characteristic to adjust the event detection thresholds adaptively, can be incorporated into existing event detection methods. Based on the official TDT corpus and contest rules, the evaluation results show that existing detection methods that incorporate LIPED achieve better performance in the cost and F1 metrics, than without.

A topic is defined as a seminal event or activity along with all directly related events and activities. It is represented as a chronological sequence of documents by different authors published on the Internet. In this paper, we define a task called topic anatomy, which summarizes and associates core parts of a topic graphically so that readers can understand the content easily. The proposed topic anatomy model, called TSCAN, derives the major themes of a topic from the eigenvectors of a temporal block association matrix. Then, the significant events of the themes and their summaries are extracted by examining the constitution of the eigenvectors. Finally, the extracted events are associated through their temporal closeness and context similarity to form the evolution graph of the topic. Experiments based on the official TDT4 corpus demonstrate that the generated evolution graphs comprehensibly describe the storylines of topics. Moreover, in terms of content coverage and consistency, the produced summaries are superior to those of other summarization methods based on human composed reference summaries.

An event can be described by a sequence of chronological documents from several information sources that together describe a story or happening. The goal of event detection and tracking is to automatically identify events and their associated documents during their life cycles. Conventional document clustering and classification techniques cannot effectively detect and track sequential events, as they ignore the temporal relationships among documents related to an event. The life cycle of an event is analogous to living beings. With abundant nourishment (i.e., related documents for the event), the life cycle is prolonged; conversely, an event or living fades away when nourishment is exhausted. Improper tracking algorithms often unnecessarily prolong or shorten the life cycle of detected events. In this paper, we propose an aging theory to model the life cycle of sequential events, which incorporates a traditional single-pass clustering algorithm to detect and track events. Our experiment results show that the proposed method achieves a better overall performance for both long-running and short-term events than previous approaches. Moreover, we find that the aging parameters of the aging schemes are profile dependent and that using proper profile-specific aging parameters improves the detection and tracking performance further

In this paper, the proposed LIPED (LIfe Profile based Event Detection) employs the concept of life profiles to predict the activeness of event for effective event detection. A group of events with similar activeness patterns shares a life profile, modeled by a hidden Markov model. Considering the burst-and-diverse property of events, LIPED identifies the activeness status of event. As a result, LIPED balances the clustering precision and recall to achieve better F1 scores than other well known approaches evaluated on the official TDT1 corpus.

In this paper, we present PVA, an adaptive personal view information agent system to track, learn and manage, user's interests in Internet documents. When user's interests change, PVA, in not only the contents, but also in the structure of user profile, is modified to adapt to the changes. Experimental results show that modulating the structure of user profile does increase the accuracy of personalization systems.

This investigation presents evolution strategies to solve quadratic assignment problems. The proposed algorithm applies family competition and clustering to enhance the solution quality. Several problems obtained from QAPLIB (Burkard et al., 1991) were tested and experimental results were compared with other approaches in the literature. Experimental results also show that the proposed algorithm is promising.