Real-Time News Event Extraction for Global Crisis Monitoring

This paper presents a real-time news event extraction system developed by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. It is capable of accurately and efficiently extracting violent and disaster events from online news without using much linguistic sophistication. In particular, in our linguistically relatively lightweight approach to event extraction, clustered news have been heavily exploited at various stages of processing. The paper describes the system's architecture, news geo-tagging, automatic pattern learning, pattern specification language, information aggregation, the issues of integrating event information in a global crisis monitoring system and new experimental evaluation.