Evolution of Event Designation in Media: Preliminary Study

Within the general purpose of information extraction, detection of event descriptions is often an important clue. An important characteristic of event designation in texts, and especially in media, is that it changes over time. Understanding how these designations evolve is important in information retrieval and information extraction. Our first hypothesis is that, when an event first occurs, media relate it in a very descriptive way (using verbal designations) whereas after some time, they use shorter nominal designations instead. Our second hypothesis is that the number of different nominal designations for an event tends to stabilize itself over time. In this article, we present our methodology concerning the study of the evolution of event designations in French documents from the news agency AFP. For this preliminary study, we focused on 7 topics which have been relatively important in France. Verbal and nominal designations of events have been manually annotated in manually selected topic-related passages. This French corpus contains a total of 2064 annotations. We then provide preliminary interesting statistical results and observations concerning these evolutions.