Linking Today's Wikipedia and News from the Past

ABSTRACT

In this paper we propose a novel task of automatically linking Wikipedia excerpts describing events to past news articles. Constantly evolving Wikipedia articles tend to summarize past events by abstracting fine-grained details that mattered when the event happened. On the other hand, contemporary news articles provide details of events, as they had happened. With connections between these two orthogonal information sources in place, a user could jump between them to acquire a holistic view on past events. We cast the linking problems into two retrieval tasks and propose a single framework for addressing them. In addition, we delineate challenges involved in both these tasks and propose a framework to address these challenges. To build a better understanding of the problem, we initially consider the simpler task of linking Wikipedia events that are systematically curated into years, decades and centuries, to relevant news articles from the past. These events come with a short textual description and a date indicating when the event happened. We present a two-stage cascade approach that leverages the temporal information associated to a given event for improving the linking effectiveness. We additionally design several baselines and show that our approach outperforms all the baselines. Through the results of studying the simplified task we come a step closer to solving the larger problem proposed in this paper. As future work, we plan to build an automatic linking system that answers to the challenges identified in this paper.

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Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Information retrieval query processing