Socially-Informed Timeline Generation for Complex Events

Understand

Existing timeline generation systems for complex events consider only information from traditional media, ignoring the rich social context provided by user-generated content that reveals representative public interests or insightful opinions.

• We instead aim to generate socially-informed timelines that contain both news article summaries and selected user comments.
• We present an optimization framework designed to balance topical cohesion between the article and comment summaries along with their informativeness and coverage of the event.
• Automatic evaluations on real-world datasets that cover four complex events show that our system produces more informative timelines than state-of-the-art systems.