Towards an Entity–Based Automatic Event Validation

Abstract

Event Detection algorithms infer the occurrence of real–world events from natural language text and always require a ground truth for their validation. However, the lack of an annotated and comprehensive ground truth makes the evaluation onerous for humans, who have to manually search for events inside it. In this paper, we envision to automatize the evaluation process by defining the novel problem of Entity–based Automatic Event Validation. We propose a first approach which validates events by estimating the temporal relationships among their representative entities within documents in the Web. Our approach reached a Kappa Statistic of 0.68 when compared with the evaluation of real–world events done by humans. This and other preliminary results motivate further research effort on this novel problem.