Using contextual analysis for news event detection

The rapidly growing amount of newswire stories stored in electronic devices raises new challenges for information retrieval technology. Traditional query-driven retrieval is not suitable for generic queries. It is desirable to have an intelligent system to automatically locate topically related events or topics in a continuous stream of newswire stories. This is the goal of automatic event detection. We propose a new approach to performing event detection from multilingual newswire stories. Unlike traditional methods which employ simple keyword matching, our method makes use of concept terms and named entities such as person, location, and organization names. Concept terms of a story are derived from statistical context analysis between sentences in the news story and stories in the concept database. We have conducted a set of experiments to study the effectiveness of our approach. The results show that the performance of detection using concept terms together with story keywords is better than traditional methods which only use keyword representation.