Recognizing Identical Events with Graph Kernels

Goran Glavas, Jan Snajder

Abstract: Identifying news stories that discuss the same real-world events is important for news tracking and retrieval. Most existing approaches rely on the traditional vector space model. We propose an approach for recognizing identical real-world events based on a structured, event-oriented document representation. We structure documents as graphs of event mentions and use graph kernels to measure the similarity between document pairs. Our experiments indicate that the proposed graph-based approach can outperform the traditional vector space model, and is especially suitable for distinguishing between topically similar, yet non-identical events.