SPIRIT: A Tree Kernel-Based Method for Topic Person Interaction Detection (Extended Abstract)

In this paper, we investigate the interactions between topic persons to help readers construct the background knowledge of a topic. We proposed a rich interactive tree structure to represent syntactic, context, and semantic information of text, and this structure is incorporated into a tree-based convolution kernel to identify segments that convey person interactions and further construct person interaction networks. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in detecting and extracting the interactions between topic persons in the text, and outperforms other extraction approaches used for comparison. Furthermore, readers will be able to easily navigate through the topic persons of interest within the interaction networks, and further construct the background knowledge of the topic to facilitate comprehension.