Evolution of Event Designation in Media: Preliminary Study

Xavier Tannier, Véronique Moriceau, Béatrice Arnulphy, Ruixin He


Abstract
Within the general purpose of information extraction, detection of event descriptions is often an important clue. An important characteristic of event designation in texts, and especially in media, is that it changes over time. Understanding how these designations evolve is important in information retrieval and information extraction. Our first hypothesis is that, when an event first occurs, media relate it in a very descriptive way (using verbal designations) whereas after some time, they use shorter nominal designations instead. Our second hypothesis is that the number of different nominal designations for an event tends to stabilize itself over time. In this article, we present our methodology concerning the study of the evolution of event designations in French documents from the news agency AFP. For this preliminary study, we focused on 7 topics which have been relatively important in France. Verbal and nominal designations of events have been manually annotated in manually selected topic-related passages. This French corpus contains a total of 2064 annotations. We then provide preliminary interesting statistical results and observations concerning these evolutions.
Anthology ID:
L12-1147
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
528–531
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/314_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xavier Tannier, Véronique Moriceau, Béatrice Arnulphy, and Ruixin He. 2012. Evolution of Event Designation in Media: Preliminary Study. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 528–531, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Evolution of Event Designation in Media: Preliminary Study (Tannier et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/314_Paper.pdf