Event Hierarchy Construction
by Gabriel Fung

Abstract

In this presentation, we try to investigate the possibility of having an algorithm to construct an event hierarchy in a text corpus based on a user query. A query is a set of words. For instance, assume that a query contains the word "Election". "Election" is directly related to the events such as 2006 US Midterm Elections Campaign, 2004 US Presidential Election Campaign and 2004 Taiwan Presidential Election Campaign. Usually, these events may further be divided into several sub-events. The 2006 US Midterm Elections Campaign can be broken down into events such as campaign for vote, election results and the resignation of Donald H. Rumsfeld. As such, an event hierarchy can be constructed. Practically, event hierarchies can assist us to efficiently locate our target information in a text corpus easily. For example, without an event hierarchy, it is very difficult to identify what are the major events related to it, when do these events happened, as well as the features and the news articles that are related to each of these events. In this presentation, we will discuss how to construct such a hierachy.

About the speaker

Dr. Gabriel Fung currently holds the title of Instructor I in the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His major research interests are data mining and quantitative analysis. In 2004, he has received the Best Student Paper Award in the 8th International Conference of Pacific-Asia Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD’04). He has published articles in top-tier journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), KDD, ICDE, ICDM and VLDB. Gabriel also serves as an Information Systems Consultant for a local (Hong Kong) design company. His major duties are to analyse the current information technologies being adopted by the company and to recommend improvements for the existing infrastructure.