Joint Inference for Event Timeline Construction

Quang Do, Wei Lu, Dan Roth

Abstract: This paper addresses the task of constructing a timeline of events mentioned in a given text. To accomplish that, we present a novel representation of the temporal structure of a news article based on time intervals. We then present an algorithmic approach that jointly optimizes the temporal structure by coupling local classifiers that predict associations and temporal relations between pairs of temporal entities with global constraints. Moreover, we present ways to leverage knowledge provided by event coreference to further improve the system performance. Overall, our experiments show that the joint inference model significantly outperformed the local classifiers by 9.2% of relative improvement in F1. The experiments also suggest that good event coreference could make remarkable contribution to a robust event timeline construction system.