Anticipatory Event Detection via Sentence Classification

The idea of event detection is to identify interesting patterns from a constant stream of incoming news documents. Previous research in event detection has largely focused on identifying the first event or tracking subsequent events belonging to a set of pre-assigned topics such as earthquakes, airline disasters, etc. In this paper, we propose a new problem, called Anticipatory Event Detection (AED), which aims to detect if a user-specified event has transpired. AED can be viewed as a personalized combination of event tracking and new event detection. We propose using a sentence classification approach to solve the AED problem for a restricted domain; detecting articles that describe final game results from NBA basketball news. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed AED solution.