Placing (Historical) Facts on a Timeline: A Classification cum Coref Resolution Approach
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for historians by providing tools to visualize historical facts from texts, though it appears incremental in its approach.
The paper tackled the problem of generating event timelines from multiple historical text documents by using a two-stage system combining important sentence classification with event coreference resolution, achieving results demonstrated on two manually annotated documents.
A timeline provides one of the most effective ways to visualize the important historical facts that occurred over a period of time, presenting the insights that may not be so apparent from reading the equivalent information in textual form. By leveraging generative adversarial learning for important sentence classification and by assimilating knowledge based tags for improving the performance of event coreference resolution we introduce a two staged system for event timeline generation from multiple (historical) text documents. We demonstrate our results on two manually annotated historical text documents. Our results can be extremely helpful for historians, in advancing research in history and in understanding the socio-political landscape of a country as reflected in the writings of famous personas.