An Evaluation Framework for Mapping News Headlines to Event Classes in a Knowledge Graph
This work addresses the need for standardized evaluation in knowledge-based event analysis, though it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking rather than introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of mapping news headlines to event classes in Wikidata by creating a benchmark dataset and evaluating unsupervised methods, including entity linking adaptations and zero-shot classification using pre-trained models, with results and resources made publicly available.
Mapping ongoing news headlines to event-related classes in a rich knowledge base can be an important component in a knowledge-based event analysis and forecasting solution. In this paper, we present a methodology for creating a benchmark dataset of news headlines mapped to event classes in Wikidata, and resources for the evaluation of methods that perform the mapping. We use the dataset to study two classes of unsupervised methods for this task: 1) adaptations of classic entity linking methods, and 2) methods that treat the problem as a zero-shot text classification problem. For the first approach, we evaluate off-the-shelf entity linking systems. For the second approach, we explore a) pre-trained natural language inference (NLI) models, and b) pre-trained large generative language models. We present the results of our evaluation, lessons learned, and directions for future work. The dataset and scripts for evaluation are made publicly available.