Linking today’s wikipedia and news from the past

In this paper we propose a novel task of automatically link-ing Wikipedia excerpts describing events to past news arti-cles. Constantly evolving Wikipedia articles tend to sum-marize past events by abstracting fine-grained details that mattered when the event happened. On the other hand, contemporary news articles provide details of events, as they had happened. With connections between these two orthog-onal information sources in place, a user could jump between them to acquire a holistic view on past events. We cast the linking problems into two retrieval tasks and propose a sin-gle framework for addressing them. In addition, we delin-eate challenges involved in both these tasks and propose a framework to address these challenges. To build a better understanding of the problem, we ini-tially consider the simpler task of linking Wikipedia events that are systematically curated into years, decades and cen-turies, to relevant news articles from the past. These events come with a short textual description and a date indicating when the event happened. We present a two-stage cascade approach that leverages the temporal information associated to a given event for improving the linking effectiveness. We additionally design several baselines and show that our ap-proach outperforms all the baselines. Through the results of studying the simplified task we come a step closer to solving the larger problem proposed in this paper. As future work, we plan to build an automatic linking system that answers to the challenges identified in this paper