Detecting and Extracting Events from Text Documents
It provides a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners working on event extraction, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge without introducing new methods.
The paper surveys computational methods for detecting and extracting events from text documents, covering linguistic foundations, machine learning techniques, and applications in domains like summarization, medicine, and social media.
Events of various kinds are mentioned and discussed in text documents, whether they are books, news articles, blogs or microblog feeds. The paper starts by giving an overview of how events are treated in linguistics and philosophy. We follow this discussion by surveying how events and associated information are handled in computationally. In particular, we look at how textual documents can be mined to extract events and ancillary information. These days, it is mostly through the application of various machine learning techniques. We also discuss applications of event detection and extraction systems, particularly in summarization, in the medical domain and in the context of Twitter posts. We end the paper with a discussion of challenges and future directions.