Socially-Informed Timeline Generation for Complex Events

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for generating socially-informed timelines for complex events by integrating news summaries with relevant user comments, improving informativeness and insightfulness over existing methods.

Contribution

It proposes an optimization approach that combines news and social media content to produce more comprehensive and insightful event timelines.

Findings

System outperforms state-of-the-art in informativeness

Comment summaries rated more insightful in human evaluations

Automatically generates more comprehensive timelines

Abstract

Existing timeline generation systems for complex events consider only information from traditional media, ignoring the rich social context provided by user-generated content that reveals representative public interests or insightful opinions. We instead aim to generate socially-informed timelines that contain both news article summaries and selected user comments. We present an optimization framework designed to balance topical cohesion between the article and comment summaries along with their informativeness and coverage of the event. Automatic evaluations on real-world datasets that cover four complex events show that our system produces more informative timelines than state-of-the-art systems. In human evaluation, the associated comment summaries are furthermore rated more insightful than editor's picks and comments ranked highly by users.