Exploiting temporal characteristics of features for effectively discovering event episodes from news corpora

Abstract

An organization performing environmental scanning generally monitors or tracks various events concerning its external environment. One of the major resources for environmental scanning is online news documents, which are readily accessible on news websites or infomediaries. However, the proliferation of the World Wide Web, which increases information sources and improves information circulation, has vastly expanded the amount of information to be scanned. Thus, it is essential to develop an effective event episode discovery mechanism to organize news documents pertaining to an event of interest. In this study, we propose two new metrics, Term Frequency × Inverse Document FrequencyTempo (TF×IDFTempo) and TF×Enhanced-IDFTempo, and develop a temporal-based event episode discovery (TEED) technique that uses the proposed metrics for feature selection and document representation. Using a traditional TF×IDF-based hierarchical agglomerative clustering technique as a performance benchmark, our empirical evaluation reveals that the proposed TEED technique outperforms its benchmark, as measured by cluster recall and cluster precision. In addition, the use of TF×Enhanced-IDFTempo significantly improves the effectiveness of event episode discovery when compared with the use of TF×IDFTempo. © 2014 ASIS&T.