EVELIN: Exploration of Event and Entity Links in Implicit Networks

Andreas Spitz, Satya Almasian, Michael Gertz

Abstract: Implicit networks that describe latent entity relations have been demonstrated to be valuable tools in information retrieval, knowledge extraction, and search in document collections. While such implicit relations offer less insight into the types of connection between entities than traditional knowledge bases, they are much easier to extract from unstructured textual sources. Furthermore, they allow the derivation of relationship strength between entities that can be used to identify and leverage important co-mentions, based on which complex constructs of semantically related entities can be assembled with ease. One example of such implicit networks are LOAD graphs, which encode the textual proximity of location-, organization-, actor-, and date-mentions in document collections for the exploration, identification and summarization of events and entity relations. Here, we present EVELIN as a graphical, web-based interface for the exploration of such implicit networks of entities on the example of a large-scale network constructed from the English Wikipedia. The interface is available for online use at http://evelin.ifi.uni-heidelberg.de/.