A text summary-based method to detect new events from streams of online news articles

New event detection (NED), which is crucial to firms’ environmental surveillance, requires timely access to and effective analysis of live streams of news articles from various online sources. These news articles, available in unprecedent frequency and quantity, are difficult to sift through manually. Most of existing techniques for NED are full-text-based; typically, they perform full-text analysis to measure the similarity between a new article and previous articles. This full-text-based approach is potentially ineffective, because a news article often contains sentences that are less relevant to define the focal event being reported and the inclusion of these less relevant sentences into the similarity estimation can impair the effectiveness of NED. To address the limitation of the full-text-based approach and support NED more effectively and efficiently, this study proposes and develops a summary-based event detection method that first selects relevant sentences of each article as a summary, then uses the resulting summaries to detect new events. We empirically evaluate our proposed method in comparison with some prevalent full-text-based techniques, including a vector space model and two deep-learning-based models. Our evaluation results confirm that the proposed method provides greater utilities for detecting new events from online news articles. This study demonstrates the value and feasibility of the text summarization approach for generating news article summaries for detecting new events from live streams of online news articles, proposes a new method more effective and efficient than the benchmark techniques, and contributes to NED research in several important ways.