Neural Storyline Extraction Model for Storyline Generation from News Articles

Storyline generation aims to extract events described on news articles under a certain news topic and reveal how those events evolve over time. Most approaches to storyline generation first train supervised models to extract events from news articles published in different time periods and then link relevant extracted events into coherent stories. They are domain dependent and cannot deal with unseen event types. To tackle this problem, approaches based on probabilistic graphic models jointly model the generations of events and storylines without the use of annotated data. However, the parameter inference procedure is too complex and models often require long time to converge. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network based approach to extract structured representations and evolution patterns of storylines without using annotated data. In this model, title and main body of a news article are assumed to share the similar storyline distribution. Moreover, similar documents described in neighboring time periods are assumed to share similar storyline distributions. Based on these assumptions, structured representations and evolution patterns of storylines can be extracted. The proposed model has been evaluated on three news corpora and the experimental results show that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for storyline generation on both accuracy and efficiency.