Event Detection and Extraction from News Articles

Event extraction is a type of information extraction(IE) that works on extracting the specific knowledge of certain incidents from texts. Nowadays the amount of available information (such as news, blogs, and social media) grows in exponential order. Therefore, it becomes imperative to develop algorithms that automatically extract the machine-readable information from large volumes of text data. In this dissertation, we focus on three problems in obtaining event-related information from news articles. (1) The first effort is to comprehensively analyze the performance and challenges in current large-scale event encoding systems. (2) The second problem involves event detection and critical information extractions from news articles. (3) Third, the efforts concentrate on event-encoding which aims to extract event extent and arguments from texts. We start by investigating the two large-scale event extraction systems (ICEWS and GDELT) in the political science domain. We design a set of experiments to evaluate the quality of the extracted events from the two target systems, in terms of reliability and correctness. The results show that there exist significant discrepancies between the outputs of automated systems and hand-coded system and the accuracy of both systems are far away from satisfying. These findings provide preliminary background and set the foundation for using advanced machine learning algorithms for event related information extraction. Inspired by the successful application of deep learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP), we propose a Multi-Instance Convolutional Neural Network (MI-CNN) model for event detection and critical sentences extraction without sentence level labels. To evaluate the model, we run a set of experiments on a real-world protest event dataset. The result shows that our model could be able to outperform the strong baseline models and extract the meaningful key sentences without domain knowledge and manually designed features. We also extend the MI-CNN model and propose an MIMTRNN model for event extraction with distant supervision to overcome the problem of lacking fine level labels and small size training data. The proposed MIMTRNN model systematically integrates the RNN, Multi-Instance Learning, and Multi-Task Learning into a unified framework. The RNN module aims to encode into the representation of entity mentions the sequential information as well as the dependencies between event arguments, which are very useful in the event extraction task. The Multi-Instance Learning paradigm makes the system does not require the precise labels in entity mention level and make it perfect to work together with distant supervision for event extraction. And the Multi-Task Learning module in our approach is designed to alleviate the potential overfitting problem caused by the relatively small size of training data. The results of the experiments on two real-world datasets(Cyber-Attack and Civil Unrest) show that our model could be able to benefit from the advantage of each component and outperform other baseline methods significantly.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Wei

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Ramakrishnan, Naren

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• North, Christopher L.
• Tandon, Ravi
• Lu, Chang-Tien
• Rangwala, Huzefa

• Event Detection
• Event Encoding
• Deep learning (Machine learning)
• Convolutional Neural Network
• Recurrent Neural Network
• Multi Instance Learning
• Multi Task Learning

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:12929

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/82238