Fulda Johanna, Brehmel Matthew, Munzner Tamara
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2016 Jan;22(1):300-9. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467531.
We present TimeLineCurator, a browser-based authoring tool that automatically extracts event data from temporal references in unstructured text documents using natural language processing and encodes them along a visual timeline. Our goal is to facilitate the timeline creation process for journalists and others who tell temporal stories online. Current solutions involve manually extracting and formatting event data from source documents, a process that tends to be tedious and error prone. With TimeLineCurator, a prospective timeline author can quickly identify the extent of time encompassed by a document, as well as the distribution of events occurring along this timeline. Authors can speculatively browse possible documents to quickly determine whether they are appropriate sources of timeline material. TimeLineCurator provides controls for curating and editing events on a timeline, the ability to combine timelines from multiple source documents, and export curated timelines for online deployment. We evaluate TimeLineCurator through a benchmark comparison of entity extraction error against a manual timeline curation process, a preliminary evaluation of the user experience of timeline authoring, a brief qualitative analysis of its visual output, and a discussion of prospective use cases suggested by members of the target author communities following its deployment.
我们展示了TimeLineCurator，这是一种基于浏览器的创作工具，它使用自然语言处理从非结构化文本文档中的时间参考中自动提取事件数据，并将它们编码到一个可视化时间线上。我们的目标是为记者和其他在网上讲述时间故事的人简化时间线创建过程。当前的解决方案涉及从源文档中手动提取和格式化事件数据，这个过程往往既繁琐又容易出错。使用TimeLineCurator，未来的时间线作者可以快速确定文档所涵盖的时间范围，以及沿此时间线发生的事件分布。作者可以推测性地浏览可能的文档，以快速确定它们是否是时间线材料的合适来源。TimeLineCurator提供了在时间线上策划和编辑事件的控件、合并来自多个源文档的时间线的能力，以及导出策划好的时间线以便在线部署的功能。我们通过将实体提取错误与手动时间线策划过程进行基准比较、对时间线创作的用户体验进行初步评估、对其视觉输出进行简要定性分析，以及讨论目标作者群体成员在其部署后提出的潜在用例，来评估TimeLineCurator。
