Giveme5W: Main Event Retrieval from News Articles by Extraction of the Five Journalistic W Questions

Extraction of event descriptors from news articles is a commonly required task for various tasks, such as clustering related articles, summarization, and news aggregation. Due to the lack of generally usable and publicly available methods optimized for news, many researchers must redundantly implement such methods for their project. Answers to the five journalistic W questions (5Ws) describe the main event of a news article, i.e., who did what, when, where, and why. The main contribution of this paper is Giveme5W, the first open-source, syntax-based 5W extraction system for news articles. The system retrieves an article’s main event by extracting phrases that answer the journalistic 5Ws. In an evaluation with three assessors and 60 articles, we find that the extraction precision of 5W phrases is p = 0.7.