Automatic Generation of Timelines for Past-Web Events

Despite significant advances in web archive infrastructures, the problem of exploring the historical heritage preserved by web archives is yet to be solved. Timeline generation emerges in this context as one possible solution for automatically producing summaries of news over time. Thanks to this, users can gain a better sense of reported news events, entities, stories or topics over time, such as getting a summary of the most important news about a politician, an organisation or a locality. Web archives play an important role here by providing access to a historical set of preserved information. This particular characteristic of web archives makes them an irreplaceable infrastructure and a valuable source of knowledge that contributes to the process of timeline generation. Accordingly, the authors of this chapter developed “Tell me Stories” (http://archive.tellmestories.pt), a news summarisation system, built on top of the infrastructure of Arquivo.pt—the Portuguese web-archive—to automatically generate a timeline summary of a given topic. In this chapter, we begin by providing a brief overview of the most relevant research conducted on the automatic generation of timelines for past-web events. Next, we describe the architecture and some use cases for “Tell me Stories”. Our system demonstrates how web archives can be used as infrastructures to develop innovative services. We conclude this chapter by enumerating open challenges in this field and possible future directions in the general area of temporal summarisation in web archives.