Cross-document event clustering using knowledge mining from co-reference chains

Abstract

Unifying terminology usages which captures more term semantics is useful for event clustering. This paper proposes a metric of normalized chain edit distance to mine, incrementally, controlled vocabulary from cross-document co-reference chains. Controlled vocabulary is employed to unify terms among different co-reference chains. A novel threshold model that incorporates both time decay function and spanning window uses the controlled vocabulary for event clustering on streaming news. Under correct co-reference chains, the proposed system has a 15.97% performance increase compared to the baseline system, and a 5.93% performance increase compared to the system without introducing controlled vocabulary. Furthermore, a Chinese co-reference resolution system with a chain filtering mechanism is used to experiment on the robustness of the proposed event clustering system. The clustering system using noisy co-reference chains still achieves a 10.55% performance increase compared to the baseline system. The above shows that our approach is promising.