Title: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Timeline Extraction,
Abstract: In this paper we present an approach to extract ordered timelines of events,
their participants, locations and times from a set of multilingual and
cross-lingual data sources. Based on the assumption that event-related
information can be recovered from different documents written in different
languages, we extend the Cross-document Event Ordering task presented at
SemEval 2015 by specifying two new tasks for, respectively, Multilingual and
Cross-lingual Timeline Extraction. We then develop three deterministic
algorithms for timeline extraction based on two main ideas. First, we address
implicit temporal relations at document level since explicit time-anchors are
too scarce to build a wide coverage timeline extraction system. Second, we
leverage several multilingual resources to obtain a single, inter-operable,
semantic representation of events across documents and across languages. The
result is a highly competitive system that strongly outperforms the current
state-of-the-art. Nonetheless, further analysis of the results reveals that
linking the event mentions with their target entities and time-anchors remains
a difficult challenge. The systems, resources and scorers are freely available
to facilitate its use and guarantee the reproducibility of results.