Event Detection and Semantic Storytelling: Generating a Travelogue from a large Collection of Personal Letters

We present an approach at identifying a specific class of events, movement action events (MAEs), in ca. 2,800 personal letters exchanged by the German architect Erich Mendelsohn and his wife, Luise. A backend system uses these and other semantic analysis results as input for an authoring environment that curators can use to produce new pieces of content. The human expert will receive recommendations from the system with the goal of putting together a travelogue, i. e., a description of the trips and journeys undertaken by the couple. We describe the components and also apply the system to news data.