Toward Building Events Database to Support Information Retrieval Systems.

Events represent a crucial source of information in any text; dates and proper names (people, locations, organizations, products, diseases, etc.) combine to describe a certain event. In this paper, our focus is on these events, on how we find them in the text, extract them, organize them, save them in a database, and use them to answer any question about them. In our system, each event has three main types of identifying factors: keywords that indicate that an interesting event has occurred, dates that specify the time of the event, and proper nouns that specify the people, organizations, locations, products, etc., that are involved in the event. In this paper, we describe a system that uses these keys to find events, classify them, and save them in a database along with the identifier of the document that mentions that event. The retrieval process uses this information to provide the user with menus to form queries about the events; it then executes those queries, and finds the related documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]