Inferring implicit event locations from context with distributional similarities

Abstract

Automatic event location extraction from text plays a crucial role in many applications such as infectious disease surveillance and natural disaster monitoring. The fundamental limitation of previous work such as SpaceEval is the limited scope of extraction, targeting only at locations that are explicitly stated in a syntactic structure. This leads to missing a lot of implicit information inferable from context in a document, which amounts to nearly 40% of the entire location information. To overcome this limitation for the first time, we present a system that infers the implicit event locations from a given document. Our system exploits distributional semantics, based on the hypothesis that if two events are described by similar expressions, it is likely that they occur in the same location. For example, if “A bomb exploded causing 30 victims” and “many people died from terrorist attack in Boston” are reported in the same document, it is highly likely that the bomb exploded in Boston. Our system shows good performance of a 0.58 F1-score, where state-of-the-art classifiers for intra-sentential spatiotemporal relations achieve around 0.60 F1-scores.