Unsupervised Biographical Event Extraction Using Wikipedia Traffic

“What is Julian Assange known for?” Can we define his importance in terms of key events? • Some people are famous for what they did, rather than what they are • Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and In 2012 he was granted political asylum by Ecuador are sentences which quickly convey Assange’s notability • Current way of extracting these events→ need to create a huge data set to train on! → $$$ •Many ways someone can be famous → lots of data • Spikes in Wikipedia page traffic → something interesting happened • Find spikes→ find edit to page at the same time → match sentence in current-day article to edit • No annotation needed! “Obama was re-elected president in November 2012..” “On November 4, Obama won the presidency..”