Summarizing Complex Events: a Cross-Modal Solution of Storylines Extraction and Reconstruction

The rapid development of Web2.0 leads to significant information redundancy. Especially for a complex news event, it is difficult to understand its general idea within a single coherent picture. A complex event often contains branches, intertwining narratives and side news which are all called storylines. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to tackle the challenging problem of storylines extraction and reconstruction. Specifically, we first investigate two requisite properties of an ideal storyline. Then a unified algorithm is devised to extract all effective storylines by optimizing these properties at the same time. Finally, we reconstruct all extracted lines and generate the high-quality story map. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method is quite efficient and highly competitive, which can bring about quicker, clearer and deeper comprehension to readers.