Entity Resolution (ER) constitutes a challenging data integration task that is typically addressed through the Filtering-Verification framework. Filtering reduces the quadratic search space in an unsupervised manner that relies on heuristics, whereas verification performs matching, usually through a machine or a deep learning-based approach. Numerous solutions have been proposed for each step, but analyzing their combined performance constitutes a non-trivial task, due to technical and methodological challenges, while the literature typically examines them as orthogonal tasks. We facilitate the benchmarking of state-of-the-art verification algorithms under realistic settings, applying them to the candidate pairs generated by established filtering approaches from popular real-world datasets. To democratize this benchmarking, we developed an open-source, hands-off Web application, called SMBench, which allows users to perform a wealth of experiments through an intuitive user interface that requires no coding or ER expertise. SMBench is publicly available at https://smbench.kbs.uni-hannover.de , while its code is released through https://github.com/erbench/erbench . We delve into its frontend and backend, elaborating on the technologies used for their implementation as well as on the state-of-the-art ER methods they support. Using SMBench, we perform an extended experimental analysis that combines 3 filtering methods with 7 verification approaches, applying them to 9 datasets. The experimental results lead to interesting insights into the relative effectiveness, time and memory efficiency of the considered methods.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), have advanced the interpretability of black-box machine learning models by approximating their behavior locally using interpretable surrogate models. However, LIME's inherent randomness in perturbation and sampling can lead to locality and instability issues, especially in scenarios with limited training data. In such cases, data scarcity can result in the generation of unrealistic variations and samples that deviate from the true data manifold. Consequently, the surrogate model may fail to accurately approximate the complex decision boundary of the original model. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Instance-based Transfer Learning LIME framework (ITL-LIME) that enhances explanation fidelity and stability in data-constrained environments. ITL-LIME introduces instance transfer learning into the LIME framework by leveraging relevant real instances from a related source domain to aid the explanation process in the target domain. Specifically, we employ clustering to partition the source domain into clusters with representative prototypes. Instead of generating random perturbations, our method retrieves pertinent real source instances from the source cluster whose prototype is most similar to the target instance. These are then combined with the target instance's neighboring real instances. To define a compact locality, we further construct a contrastive learning-based encoder as a weighting mechanism to assign weights to the instances from the combined set based on their proximity to the target instance. Finally, these weighted source and target instances are used to train the surrogate model for explanation purposes. Experimental evaluation with real-world datasets demonstrates that ITL-LIME greatly improves the stability and fidelity of LIME explanations in scenarios with limited data. Our code is available at https://github.com/rehanrazaa/ITL-LIME.

Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges that requires urgent adaptation and resilience efforts, highlighting the need for both scientific solutions and effective communication. In the digital age, online content plays a key role in shaping climate narratives. Therefore, previous research has mainly focused on public perception or categorized content by topics such as impacts, mitigation, policy, etc. Despite these efforts, identifying discussions that address climate change adaptation is crucial for monitoring resilience and assessing public sentiment, while recognizing denial narratives helps combat misinformation. Moreover, the public's exposure to online climate content can either lead to or hinder climate action, emphasizing the need for climate content moderation. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-stage framework where stage 1 categorizes climate-related content into adaptation, resilience, and denial while stage 2 moderates content by enhancing or intervening based on its alignment with climate goals. We present a novel dataset by manually annotating publicly available tweets and news articles into different climate categories with the help of a taxonomy developed by domain experts. Extensive experiments with benchmark climate and other domain datasets validate the efficacy of our prediction stage, while human and external evaluations confirm the relevance of our moderation stage.

Abstract Federated learning (FL) is an emerging communication-efficient and collaborative learning paradigm of machine learning with privacy guarantees. As these advancements unfold, adapting FL for fairness-aware learning becomes crucial. In this context, we propose a pre-processing fairness and utility (balanced accuracy) enhancing agnostic federated learning framework (Fed-FUEL) that mitigates discrimination embedded in the non-independent identically distributed data. We contribute a novel adaptive data manipulation method that mitigates discrimination embedded in the data at client side during optimization, resulting in an optimized and fair centralized server. This pre-processing approach abstracts the model architecture from the equation, offering a significant advantage in a federated environment. This abstraction not only facilitates a broader application across diverse model architectures without necessitating modifications but also sidesteps the potential complexities and inefficiencies associated with model-specific in-processing methods. Extensive experiments with a range of publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the competing baselines in terms of both discrimination mitigation and predictive performance. Our model effectively adapts to both statistical and causal fairness notions, as shown through our experiments.

Zero-Shot Stance Detection (ZSSD) identifies an author’s stance towards unseen targets. Existing works have mainly focused on contrastive, meta, adversarial learning, or data augmentation but face issues like data scarcity, generalizability , and lack of coherence between text and targets. Moreover, stance detection must be interpretable to ensure transparency. Recent works with large language models (LLMs) aim to enhance unseen target knowledge or generate explanations but often rely excessively on explicit reasoning or provide coarse explanations, overlooking implicit cues and complicating interpretation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel interpretable multi-stage ZSSD framework. Stage 1 decodes explanations (rationales) justifying the stance while Stage 2 provides the final stance label, thus providing inherent interpretability in predicting stances. Extensive experiments prove that our approach outperforms other baselines with an average improvement in F1 scores of 27.99% with LLMs and 23.60% without LLMs for SemEval and 14.62% with LLMs and 25.24% without LLMs for VAST datasets for the ZSSD task, benefiting from the proposed pipeline architecture and interpretable design. Furthermore, to mitigate the harmful effects of offensive content and promote a more respectful online environment, we integrate an intervention module that leverages the contextual insights derived from our ZSSD framework with the ethics-based text generation power of LLMs to develop interventions. Automatic and human evaluation of LLM-generated interventions based on various proposed criteria provide insights into how LLMs perceive similar information from different perspectives, which can help foster morally sound and respectful online discourse.

Abstract In the Intelligent Public Transportation Systems (IPTS) domain, predicting the number of commuters on-board, entering or leaving a metro train or a bus, i.e. the Passenger Flow (PF), is crucial for optimizing resource allocation and enhancing commuter satisfaction. In urban scenarios, the public transport system is often managed by distinct competing mobility providers. Traditional centralized machine learning models for PF prediction usually require data sharing among such competitors, leading to privacy and economic concerns. To overcome these issues, we propose exploiting Federated Learning (FL) in the PF predictions problem, as only model parameters must be shared among entities. Still, a straightforward application of FL can have some pitfalls. On one hand, it is widely recognized that FL can struggle with data heterogeneity, which is likely in the case of data acquired by distinct companies managing different public mobility services. Moreover, spatio-temporal features are not explicitly handled by classical FL. In this paper, we propose FedFlow: a personalized federated learning framework tailored for PF prediction. The proposed framework encompasses a personalized mechanism meant to refine local models based on client similarities, calculated by only leveraging publicly available domain-dependent information. The proposed framework has been experimentally validated on mobility data collected in a major Italian city, comparing FL predictions obtained by FedFlow against those obtained by LSTM models trained on local data, centralized data, FedAvg, and PerFedAvg. Results show that FedFlow outperforms all the considered adversary techniques. This work demonstrates that our proposal of personalized FL is effective in predicting PF while ensuring data privacy.

As Federated Learning (FL) gains prominence in distributed machine learning applications, achieving fairness without compromising predictive performance becomes paramount. The data being gathered from distributed clients in an FL environment often leads to class imbalance. In such scenarios, balanced accuracy rather than accuracy is the true representation of model performance. However, most state-of-the-art fair FL methods report accuracy as the measure of performance, which can lead to misguided interpretations of the model's effectiveness to mitigate discrimination. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first attempt towards achieving Pareto-optimal trade-offs between balanced accuracy and fairness in a federated environment (FairTrade). By utilizing multi-objective optimization, the framework negotiates the intricate balance between model's balanced accuracy and fairness. The framework's agnostic design adeptly accommodates both statistical and causal fairness notions, ensuring its adaptability across diverse FL contexts. We provide empirical evidence of our framework's efficacy through extensive experiments on five real-world datasets and comparisons with six baselines. The empirical results underscore the potential of our framework in improving the trade-off between fairness and balanced accuracy in FL applications.

In this work, we aim to understand the general public perception of societal issues related to the current climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter (X). Social media discussions on such matters often lead to misleading information, resulting in delays in initiatives proposed by governments or policymakers. Hence, we focus on extracting relevant information from the conversations on climate change and COVID that could be useful for authorities to curb the spread of potentially biased information by proposing the classification tasks of relevance detection (RD) and information categorization (IC). We first curate the datasets for the RD and IC tasks for the climate domain and extend the COVID-19 benchmark attention-worthy Twitter dataset for the IC task through manual annotation. We initially conduct experiments with LLMs and observe that LLMs can extract the relevant information in zero and few-shot settings based on multi-perspective reasoning in the form of cognitive empathy and ethical standards, but still perform worse than fine-tuned small language models. Based on the initial findings, we conclude that LLMs may not be the best extractor of relevant information, but induce cognitive empathy and ethical reasonings that can intuitively guide supervised models. To achieve this idea, we develop a cognitive empathy and ethical reasoning-based multi-tasking pipelined network for RD and IC tasks. Our proposed approach provides valuable insights that could be useful in real-world scenarios for governments, policymakers, and other researchers to decode the overall public outlook on societal issues.

As Federated Learning (FL) gains prominence in secure machine learning applications, achieving trustworthy predictions without compromising predictive performance becomes paramount. While Differential Privacy (DP) is extensively used for its effective privacy protection, yet its application as a lossy protection method can lower the predictive performance of the machine learning model. Also, the data being gathered from distributed clients in an FL environment often leads to class imbalance making traditional accuracy measure less reflective of the true performance of prediction model. In this context, we introduce a fairness-aware FL framework (TrustFed) based on Gaussian differential privacy and Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO), which effectively protects privacy while providing fair and accurate predictions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt towards achieving Pareto-optimal trade-offs between balanced accuracy and fairness in a federated environment while safeguarding the privacy of individual clients. The framework’s flexible design adeptly accommodates both statistical parity and equal opportunity fairness notions, ensuring its applicability in various FL scenarios. We demonstrate our framework’s effectiveness through comprehensive experiments on five real-world datasets. TrustFed consistently achieves comparable performance fairness tradeoff to the state-of-the-art (SoTA) baseline models while preserving the anonymization rights of users in FL applications.

Abstract Multi-target multi-camera tracking is crucial to intelligent transportation systems. Numerous recent studies have been undertaken to address this issue. Nevertheless, using the approaches in real-world situations is challenging due to the scarcity of publicly available data and the laborious process of manually annotating the new dataset and creating a tailored rule-based matching system for each camera scenario. To address this issue, we present a novel solution termed LaMMOn , an end-to-end transformer and graph neural network-based multi-camera tracking model. LaMMOn consists of three main modules: (1) Language Model Detection (LMD) for object detection; (2) Language and Graph Model Association module (LGMA) for object tracking and trajectory clustering; (3) Text-to-embedding module (T2E) that overcome the problem of data limitation by synthesizing the object embedding from defined texts. LaMMOn can be run online in real-time scenarios and achieve a competitive result on many datasets, e.g., CityFlow (HOTA 76.46%), I24 (HOTA 25.7%), and TrackCUIP (HOTA 80.94%) with an acceptable FPS (from 12.20 to 13.37) for an online application.

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, are crucial resources to obtain situational information during disease outbreaks. Due to the sheer volume of user-generated content, providing tools that can automatically classify input texts into various types, such as symptoms, transmission, prevention measures, etc., and generate concise situational updates is necessary. Apart from high classification accuracy, interpretability is an important requirement when designing machine learning models for tasks in medical domain. In this article, we provide annotated epidemic-related datasets with labels of information types and rationales, which are short phrases from the original tweets, to support the assigned labels. Next, we introduce a trustworthy approach for the automatic classification of tweets posted during epidemics. Our classification model is able to extract short explanations/rationales for output decisions on unseen data. Moreover, we propose a simple graph-based ranking method to generate short summaries of tweets. Experiments on two epidemic-related datasets show the following: 1) our classification model obtains an average of 82% Macro-F1 and better interpretability scores in terms of Token-F1 (20% improvement) than baselines; 2) the extracted rationales capture essential disease-related information in the tweets; 3) our graph-based method with rationales is simple, yet efficient for generating concise situational updates.

Multi-target multi-camera tracking (MTMCT) is an important application in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). The conventional works follow the tracking-by-detection scheme and use the information of the object image separately while matching the object from different cameras. As a result, the association information from the object image is lost. To utilize this information, we propose an efficient MTMCT application that builds features in the form of a graph and customizes graph similarity to match the vehicle objects from different cameras. We present algorithms for both the online scenario, where only the past images are used to match a vehicle object, and the offline scenario, where a given vehicle object is tracked with past and future images. For offline scenarios, our method achieves an IDF1-score of 0.8166 on the Cityflow dataset, which contains the actual scenes of the city from multiple street cameras. For online scenarios, our method achieves an IDF1-score of 0.75 with an FPS of 14.

Entity Resolution is the task of identifying pairs of entity profiles that represent the same real-world object. To avoid checking a quadratic number of entity pairs, various filtering techniques have been proposed that fall into two main categories: (i) blocking workflows group together entity profiles with identical or similar signatures, and (ii) nearest-neighbor methods convert all entity profiles into vectors and identify the closest ones to every query entity. Unfortunately, the main techniques from these two categories have rarely been compared in the literature and, thus, their relative performance is unknown. We perform the first systematic experimental study that investigates the relative performance of the main representatives per category over numerous established datasets. Comparing techniques from different categories turns out to be a non-trivial task due to the various configuration parameters that are hard to fine-tune, but have a significant impact on performance. We consider a plethora of parameter configurations, optimizing each technique with respect to recall and precision targets. Both schema-agnostic and schema-based settings are evaluated. The experimental results provide novel insights into the effectiveness, the time efficiency and the scalability of the considered techniques.

Climate change has become one of the biggest challenges of our time. Social media platforms such as Twitter play an important role in raising public awareness and spreading knowledge about the dangers of the current climate crisis. With the increasing number of campaigns and communication about climate change through social media, the information could create more awareness and reach the general public and policy makers. However, these Twitter communications lead to polarization of beliefs, opinion-dominated ideologies, and often a split into two communities of climate change deniers and believers. In this paper, we propose a framework that helps identify denier statements on Twitter and thus classifies the stance of the tweet into one of the two attitudes towards climate change (denier/believer). The sentimental aspects of Twitter data on climate change are deeply rooted in general public attitudes toward climate change. Therefore, our work focuses on learning two closely related tasks: Stance Detection and Sentiment Analysis of climate change tweets. We propose a multi-task framework that performs stance detection (primary task) and sentiment analysis (auxiliary task) simultaneously. The proposed model incorporates the feature-specific and shared-specific attention frameworks to fuse multiple features and learn the generalized features for both tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed framework increases the performance of the primary task, i.e., stance detection by benefiting from the auxiliary task, i.e., sentiment analysis compared to its uni-modal and single-task variants.

Our study focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action, by identifying public attitudes on Twitter about climate change. Public consent and participation is the key factor in dealing with climate crises. However, discussions about climate change on Twitter are often influenced by the polarised beliefs that shape the discourse and divide it into communities of climate change deniers and believers. In our work, we propose a framework that helps identify different attitudes in tweets about climate change (deny, believe, ambiguous). Previous literature often lacks an efficient architecture or ignores the characteristics of climate-denier tweets. Moreover, the presence of various emotions with different levels of intensity turns out to be relevant for shaping discussions on climate change. Therefore, our paper utilizes emotion recognition and emotion intensity prediction as auxiliary tasks for our main task of stance detection. Our framework injects the words affecting the emotions embedded in the tweet to capture the overall representation of the attitude in terms of the emotions associated with it. The final task-specific and shared feature representations are fused with efficient embedding and attention techniques to detect the correct attitude of the tweet. Extensive experiments on our novel curated dataset, two publicly available climate change datasets (ClimateICWSM-2023 and ClimateStance-2022), and a benchmark dataset for stance detection (SemEval-2016) validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Increasing privacy concerns have led to decentralized and federated machine learning techniques that allow individual clients to consult and train models collaboratively without sharing private information. Some of these applications, such as medical and healthcare, require the final decisions to be interpretable. One common form of data in these applications is multivariate time series, where deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks based approaches, have established excellent performance in their classification tasks. However, promising results and performance of deep learning models are a black box, and their decisions cannot always be guaranteed and trusted. While several approaches address the interpretability of deep learning models for multivariate time series data in a centralized environment, less effort has been made in a federated setting. In this work, we introduce FLAMES2Graph, a new horizontal federated learning framework designed to interpret the deep learning decisions of each client. FLAMES2Graph extracts and visualizes those input subsequences that are highly activated by a convolutional neural network. Besides, an evolution graph is created to capture the temporal dependencies between the extracted distinct subsequences. The federated learning clients only share this temporal evolution graph with the centralized server instead of trained model weights to create a global evolution graph. Our extensive experiments on various datasets from well-known multivariate benchmarks indicate that the FLAMES2Graph framework significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art federated methods while keeping privacy and augmenting network decision interpretation.

In this work, we address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action by focusing on identifying public attitudes toward climate change on social media platforms such as Twitter. Climate change is threatening the health of the planet and humanity. Public engagement is critical to address climate change. However, climate change conversations on Twitter tend to polarize beliefs, leading to misinformation and fake news that influence public attitudes, often dividing them into climate change believers and deniers. Our paper proposes an approach to classify the attitude of climate change tweets (believe/deny/ambiguous) to identify denier statements on Twitter. Most existing approaches for detecting stances and classifying climate change tweets either overlook deniers’ tweets or do not have a suitable architecture. The relevant literature suggests that emotions and higher levels of toxicity are prevalent in climate change Twitter conversations, leading to a delay in appropriate climate action. Therefore, our work focuses on learning stance detection (main task) while exploiting the auxiliary tasks of recognizing emotions and offensive utterances. We propose a multimodal multitasking framework MEMOCLiC that captures the input data using different embedding techniques and attention frameworks, and then incorporates the learned emotional and offensive expressions to obtain an overall representation of the features relevant to the stance of the input tweet. Extensive experiments conducted on a novel curated climate change dataset and two benchmark stance detection datasets (SemEval-2016 and ClimateStance-2022) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Visualization-based approaches have recently been used in conjunction with signature-based techniques to detect variants of malware files. Indeed, it is sufficient to modify some byte of executable files to modify the signature and, thus, to elude a signature-based detector. In this paper, we design a GAN-based architecture that allows an attacker to generate variants of a malware in which the malware patterns found by visualization-based approaches are hidden, thus producing a new version of the malware that is not detected by both signature-based and visualization-based techniques. The experiments carried out on a well-known malware dataset show a success rate of 100% in generating new variants of malware files that are not detected from the state-of-the-art visualization-based technique.

Abstract Federated learning is an emerging collaborative learning paradigm of Machine learning involving distributed and heterogeneous clients. Enormous collections of continuously arriving heterogeneous data residing on distributed clients require federated adaptation of efficient mining algorithms to enable fair and high-quality predictions with privacy guarantees and minimal response delay. In this context, we propose a federated adaptation that mitigates discrimination embedded in the streaming data while handling concept drifts (FAC-Fed). We present a novel adaptive data augmentation method that mitigates client-side discrimination embedded in the data during optimization, resulting in an optimized and fair centralized server. Extensive experiments on a set of publicly available streaming and static datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt towards fairness-aware federated adaptation for stream classification, therefore, to prove the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art, we compare the centralized version of our proposed method with three centralized stream classification baseline models (FABBOO, FAHT, CSMOTE). The experimental results show that our method outperforms the current methods in terms of both discrimination mitigation and predictive performance.

Manually inspecting text in a document collection to assess whether an event occurs in it is a cumbersome task. Although a manual inspection can allow one to identify and discard false events, it becomes infeasible with increasing numbers of automatically detected events. In this paper, we present a system to automatize event validation, defined as the task of determining whether a given event occurs in a given document or corpus. In addition to supporting users seeking for information that corroborates a given event, event validation can also boost the precision of automatically detected event sets by discarding false events and preserving the true ones. The system allows to specify events, retrieves candidate web documents, and assesses whether events occur in them. The validation results are shown to the user, who can revise the decision of the system. The validation method relies on a supervised model to predict the occurrence of events in a non-annotated corpus. This system can also be used to build ground-truths for event corpora.

Manually inspecting text to assess whether an event occurs in a document collection is an onerous and time consuming task. Although a manual inspection to discard the false events would increase the precision of automatically detected sets of events, it is not a scalable approach. In this paper, we automatize event validation, defined as the task of determining whether a given event occurs in a given document or corpus. The introduction of automatic event validation as a post-processing step of event detection can boost the precision of the detected event set, discarding false events and preserving the true ones. We propose a novel automatic method for event validation, which relies on a supervised model to predict the occurrence of events in a non-annotated corpus. The data for training the model is gathered by exploiting the crowdsourcing paradigm. Experiments on real-world events and documents show that our proposed method (i) outperforms the state-of-the-art event validation approach and (ii) increases the precision of event detection while preserving recall.

The Web of data is constantly evolving based on the dynamics of its content. Current Web search engine technologies consider static collections and do not factor in explicitly or implicitly available temporal information, that can be leveraged to gain insights into the dynamics of the data. In this paper, we hypothesize that by employing the temporal aspect as the primary means for capturing the evolution of entities, it is possible to provide entity-based accessibility to Web archives. We empirically show that the edit activity on Wikipedia can be exploited to provide evidence of the evolution of Wikipedia pages over time, both in terms of their content and in terms of their temporally defined relationships, classified in literature as events. Finally, we present results from our extensive analysis of a dataset consisting of 31,998 Wikipedia pages describing politicians, and observations from in-depth case studies. Our findings reflect the usefulness of leveraging temporal information in order to study the evolution of entities and breed promising grounds for further research.

A competence is the effective performance in a domain at different levels of proficiency. Educational institutions apply competences to understand whether a person has a particular level of ability or skill. Educational resource enriched with competence information allows learners identifying, on a fine-grained level, which resources to study with the aim to reach a specific competence target. However, the process of annotating learning objects with competence levels is a very time consuming task, ideally, this task should be performed by experts on the subjects of the educational resources. Due to this, most educational resources available online do not enclose competence information. In this paper, we present a method to tackle the problem of automatically assigning an educational resource with competence levels. To solve these problems, we exploit information extracted from external repositories available on the Web, which lead us to a domain independent approach. We demonstrate the quality of the proposed methods through an evaluation on real world data with an additional user study. Results show that the automatic competence level assignment achieves 84% precision on ground truth data. The key implications of our approach are: first, it effectively facilitates experts in the arduous task of competence assignment and second, it directly supports learners to retrieve proper leveled material.

One of the main advantages of Web services is that they can be composed into more complex processes in order to achieve a given business goal. However, such potentiality cannot be fully exploited until suitable methods and techniques allowing us to enable automatic discovery of composed processes are provided. Indeed, nowadays service discovery still focuses on matching atomic services by typically checking the similarity of functional parameters, such as inputs and outputs. However, a more profitable process discovering can be reached if both internal structure and component services are taken into account. Based on this main intuition, in this paper we describe a method for discovering composite OWL-S processes that founds on the following main contributions: (i) proposing a graph-based representation of composite OWL-S processes; and (ii) introducing an algorithm that matches over such (graph-based) representations and computes their degree of matching via combining the similarity of the atomic services they comprise and the similarity of the control flow among them. Finally, as another contribution of our research, we conducted a comprehensive experimental campaign where we tested our proposed algorithm by deriving insightful trade-offs of benefits and limitations of the overall framework for discovering Semantic Web services.

Recent pandemics such as Swine Flu have caused concern for public health officials. Given the ever increasing pace at which infectious diseases can spread globally, officials must be prepared to react sooner and with greater epidemic intelligence gathering capabilities. However, state-of-the-art systems for Epidemic Intelligence have not kept the pace with the growing need for more robust public health event detection. In this paper, we propose a game-changing approach where public health events are detected in an unsupervised manner. We address the problems associated with adapting an unsupervised learner to the medical domain and in doing so, propose an approach which combines aspects from different feature-based event detection methods. We evaluate our approach with a real world dataset with respect to the quality of article clusters. Our results show that we are able to achieve a precision of 66% and a recall of 81% when evaluated using manually annotated, real-world data. This shows promising results for the use of such techniques in this new problem setting.