Automatic Life Event Tree Generation for Older Adults

Fang Gui, Xi Wu, Min Hu, Jiaoyun Yang

Abstract: Studies have shown that learning personal stories could help provide individualized eldercare services. However, personal stories are often disordered because of the scattered collection, including informal interviews or daily interactions, which brings difficulties in acquiring valuable information quickly. One solution to this problem is to extract events from personal stories and automatically organize them in chronological order. Events extracted by current methods from social media or news corpus are mainly organized in a linear structure. These works usually focus on the event time and ignore the consistency of event contents when organizing events. This paper aims to organize events into a tree structure based on an event network, with stem nodes representing key event topics and branch nodes representing detailed events. Social workers or caregivers can clarify the life experience of the older adults quickly through the event tree and have a preliminary understanding of them. The experiments show that the event tree generated by our method has a better performance in consistency than current event organization methods. A survey study shows that our method achieves the highest logical coherence for the event tree branches compared with other algorithms.