Event Models for Historical Perspectives: Determining Relations between High and Low Level Events in Text, Based on the Classification of Time, Location and Participants

In this paper, we report on a study that was performed within the “Semantics of History” project on how descriptions of historical events are realized in different types of text and what the implications are for modeling the event information. We believe that different historical perspectives of writers correspond in some degree with genre distinction and correlate with variation in language use. To capture differences between event representations in diverse text types and thus to identify relations between historical events, we defined an event model. We observed clear relations between particular parts of event descriptions actors, time and location modifiers. Texts, written shortly after an event happened, use more specific and uniquely occurring event descriptions than texts describing the same events but written from a longer time perspective. We carried out some statistical corpus research to confirm this hypothesis. The ability to automatically determine relations between historical events and their sub-events over textual data, based on the relations between event participants, time markers and locations, will have important repercussions for the design of historical information retrieval systems.