Toward computer-supported semi-automated timelines of future events

During a Futures Study, researchers analyze a significant quantity of information dispersed across multiple document databases to gather conjectures about future events, making it challenging for researchers to retrieve all predicted events described in publications quickly. Generating a timeline of future events is time-consuming and prone to errors, requiring a group of experts to execute appropriately. This work introduces NERMAP, a system capable of semi-automating the process of discovering future events, organizing them in a timeline through Named Entity Recognition supported by machine learning, and gathering up to 83% of future events found in documents when compared to humans. The system identified future events that we failed to detect during the tests. Using the system allows researchers to perform the analysis in significantly less time, thus reducing costs. Therefore, the proposed approach enables a small group of researchers to efficiently process and analyze a large volume of documents, enhancing their capability to identify and comprehend information in a timeline while minimizing costs.