Unsupervised Biographical Event Extraction Using Wikipedia Traffic

Biographical summarisation can provide succinct and meaningful answers to the question “Who is X?”. Current supervised summarisation approaches extract sentences from documents using features from textual context. In this paper, we explore a novel approach to biographical summarisation, by extracting important sentences from an entity’s Wikipedia page based on internet traffic to the page over time. Using a pilot data set, we found that it is feasible to extract key sentences about people’s notability without the need for a large annotated corpus.