Programme booklet (pdf)

PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS
Abstract
Parse and Tag Somali Pirates
van Erp, Marieke and Malaisé, Véronique and van Hage, Willem and
Osinga, Vincent and Coleto, Juan Manuel
VU University Amsterdam
Events are the most prevalent complex entities described in user contributed social
network activities, newswire, commercial infringement reports etc. Unfortunately, due
to the nature of free text, event descriptions can take many forms, making querying for
or reasoning over them difficult.
We present an approach for event extraction from piracy attack reports issued by the
International Chamber of Commerce (ICC-CCS[1]). As the piracy attack reports are
semi-structured, we can treat the extraction task as a segmentation and labelling
problem. We extract information from the reports about participants, weapons,
locations, times and types of events, and store the information as structured event
instances. We argue that an event model is not only an intuitive representation for
such information, enabling automatic analysis and reasoning over the attacks and their
components, but also a very powerful tool for knowledge and data integration. We
show that the event model enables automatic analysis of the data, so questions such as
"How did the weapon use of pirates evolve over time?" can be answered.
[1] http://www.icc-ccs.org
Corresponding author: marieke@cs.vu.nl
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