Event and Temporal Information Extraction towards Timelines of Wikipedia Articles

This paper explores the task of creating a timeline for historical Wikipedia articles, such as those describing wars, battles, and invasions. It focuses on extracting only the major events from the article, particularly those associated with an absolute date. Existing tools extract all possible events, while we write tools to identify time expressions and anchor them in real time. From this set of all events, we identify the major ones using a classifier. We then place these events on a timeline and label them with a time interval as small as possible. The timeline is integrated into an online user interface that displays named entities for each event and finds its locations on a map; we separately list named entities and locations mentioned in the article but not around any event.