Timeline: A Chinese Event Extraction and Exploration System.

Event extraction plays a significant role in information extraction (IE). Compared with previous works on event extraction in English, relatively little effort has been made to extract Chinese events. Existing Chinese event extraction systems have two main drawbacks. First, they can only extract a limited number of events. Second, they don't organize their extracted events by entities or date or demonstrate them in a user-friendly way. In this paper, we propose Timeline, a Chinese event extraction system that extracts massive events from Chinese online encyclopedias. Our proposed system extracts event triples (entity, date and event description) from huge numbers of articles meanwhile generating the largest Chinese structured event base. Our system also automatizes event validation and normalization procedures to harvest high-quality events, and then organize events by corresponding entities and dates. Furthermore, we have also developed an interactive web portal that encodes events along a visual timeline, which satisfies the process of exploring historical events. We also designed comprehensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our extraction and validation work. Both extracted event triples and timeline web portal are published.