Comparative summarization is an effective strategy to discover important similarities and differences in collections of documents biased to users' interests. A natural method of this task is to find important and corresponding content. In this paper, we propose a novel research task of automatic query-based across-time summarization in news archives as well as we introduce an effective method to solve this task. The proposed model first learns an orthogonal transformation between temporally distant news collections. Then, it generates a set of corresponding sentence pairs based on a concise integer linear programming framework. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the New York Times Annotated Corpus.

Abstract We propose a novel way of utilizing and accessing information stored in news archives as well as a new style of investigating the history. Our idea is to automatically generate similar entity pairs given two sets of entities, one from the past and one representing the present. This allows performing entity-oriented mapping between different times. We introduce an effective method to solve the aforementioned task based on a concise integer linear programming framework. In particular, our model first conducts typicality analysis to estimate entity representativeness. It next constructs orthogonal transformation between the two entity collections. The result is a set of typical across-time comparables. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the New York Times dataset through both qualitative and quantitative tests.

Abstract Knowledge of entity histories is often necessary for comprehensive understanding and characterization of entities. Yet, the analysis of an entity’s history is often most meaningful when carried out in comparison with the histories of other entities. In this paper, we describe a novel task ofhistory-based entity categorizationandcomparison. Based on a set of entity-related documents which are assumed as an input, we determine latent entity categories whose members share similar histories; hence, we are effectively grouping entities based on the correspondences in their historical developments. Next, we generate comparative timelines for each determined group allowing users to elucidate similarities and differences in the histories of entities. We evaluate our approach on several datasets of different entity types demonstrating its effectiveness against competitive baselines.