Toward Better Understanding Older Adults: A Biography Brief Timeline Extraction Approach

Abstract

Studies have shown that life stories can help caregivers better understand older adults, leading to better care. The original life stories are often redundant and disordered, hindering the discovery of valuable information. There has been little research on organizing older adults’ life stories automatically. This article proposes the ALBERT Based Text Extraction Network (ABTE-NET) to generate valuable event timelines to address this problem. To evaluate the proposed method, we created an Older Adults’ Life Story dataset with 80 older adults’ life stories. In experiments, we verify that the timelines generated by ABTE-NET have good readability and summarization for life stories. A survey of 33 caregivers from two nursing homes shows that timelines can help caregivers understand older adults and build positive relationships, just like life stories. More importantly, timelines are better organized and more concise than original life stories, reducing the cognitive load and helping caregivers form a preliminary understanding of the older adult quickly.