Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation

IKUWA6. Shared Heritage

Celebrating the theme ‘Shared heritage’, IKUWA6 (the 6th International Congress for Underwater Archaeology), was the first such major conference to be held in the Asia-Pacific region, and the first IKUWA meeting hosted outside Europe since the organisation’s inception in Germany in the 1990s. A primary objective of holding IKUWA6 in Australia was to give greater voice to practitioners and emerging researchers across the Asia and Pacific regions who are often not well represented in northern hemisphere scientific gatherings of this scale; and, to focus on the areas of overlap in our mutual heritage, techniques and technology. Drawing together peer-reviewed presentations by delegates from across the world who converged in Fremantle in 2016 to participate, this volume covers a stimulating diversity of themes and niche topics of value to maritime archaeology practitioners, researchers, students, historians and museum professionals across the world

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse