TODAY’S MESOP QUOTATION : WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN & WITH SYRIA ? TRY MICROSOFT !

Mining the Web to Predict Future Events / MICROSOFT

Kira Radinsky – Technion–Israel Institute of Technology – Haifa, Israel – kirar@cs.technion.ac.il

Eric Horvitz – Microsoft Research – Redmond, WA, USA – horvitz@microsoft.com

ABSTRACT

We describe and evaluate methods for learning to forecast forthcoming events of interest from a corpus containing 22 years of news stories. We consider the examples of identifying significant increases in the likelihood of disease outbreaks, deaths, and riots in advance of the occurrence of  these events in the world. We provide details of methods and studies, including the automated extraction and generalization of sequences of events from news corpora and multiple web resources. We evaluate the predictive power of the approach on real-world events withheld from the system.

WATCH PDF: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/future_news_wsdm.pdf