SEED: A Framework for Extracting Social Events from Press News

Everyday people are exchanging a huge amount of data through the Internet. Mostly, such data consist of unstructured texts, which often contain references to structured information (e.g., person names, contact records, etc.). In this work, we propose a novel solution to discover social events from actual press news edited by humans. Concretely, our method is divided in two steps, each one addressing a specific Information Extraction (IE) task: first, we use a technique to automatically recognize four classes of named-entities from press news: DATE, LOCATION, PLACE, and ARTIST. Furthermore, we detect social events by extracting ternary relations between such entities, also exploiting evidence from external sources (i.e., the Web). Finally, we evaluate both stages of our proposed solution on a real-world dataset. Experimental results highlight the quality of our first-step Named-Entity Recognition (NER) approach, which indeed performs consistently with state-of-the-art solutions. Eventually, we show how to precisely select true events from the list of all candidate events (i.e., all the ternary relations), which result from our second-step Relation Extraction (RE) method. Indeed, we discover that true social events can be detected if enough evidence of those is found in the result list of Web search engines.