Effective use of place information for event tracking

The main purpose of topic detection and tracking (TDT) is to detect, group, and organize newspaper articles reporting on the same event. Since an event is a reported occurrence at a specific time and place, and the unavoidable consequences, it is conceivable that place information in a news article plays an important role in TDT. We analyzed news articles for their characteristics of place information and devised a new topic tracking method incorporating the analysis results. Experiments show that appropriate use of place information indeed helps identifying news articles reporting on the same events.