Is Killed More Significant than Fled? A Contextual Model for Salient Event Detection

Abstract

Identifying the key events in a document is critical to holistically understanding its important information. Although measuring the salience of events is highly contextual, most previous work has used a limited representation of events that omits essential information. In this work, we propose a highly contextual model of event salience that uses a rich representation of events, incorporates document-level information and allows for interactions between latent event encodings. Our experimental results on an event salience dataset demonstrate that our model improves over previous work by an absolute 2-4% on standard metrics, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance for the task. We also propose a new evaluation metric that addresses flaws in previous evaluation methodologies. Finally, we discuss the importance of salient event detection for the downstream task of summarization.