A history and theory of textual event detection and recognition

There is large and growing amounts of textual data that contains information about human activities. Mining interesting knowledge from this textual data is a challenging task because it consists of unstructured or semistructured text that are written in natural language. In the field of artificial intelligence, event-oriented techniques are helpful in addressing this problem, where information retrieval (IR), information extraction (IE) and graph methods (GMs) are three of the most important paradigms in supporting event-oriented processing. In recent years, due to information explosions, textual event detection and recognition have received extensive research attention and achieved great success. Many surveys have been conducted to retrospectively assess the development of event detection. However, until now, all of these surveys have focused on only a single aspect of IR, IE or GMs. There is no research that provides a complete introduction or a comparison of IR, IE, and GMs. In this article, a survey about these techniques is provided from a broader perspective, and a convenient and comprehensive comparison of these techniques is given. The hallmark of this article is that it is the first survey that combines IR, IE and GMs in a single frame and will therefore benefit researchers by acting as a reference in this field.