Automating Horizon Scanning in Future Studies

Tatsuya Ishigaki, Suzuko Nishino, Sohei Washino, Hiroki Igarashi, Yukari Nagai, Yuichi Washida, Akihiko Murai


Abstract
We introduce document retrieval and comment generation tasks for automating horizon scanning. This is an important task in the field of futurology that collects sufficient information for predicting drastic societal changes in the mid- or long-term future. The steps used are: 1) retrieving news articles that imply drastic changes, and 2) writing subjective comments on each article for others’ ease of understanding. As a first step in automating these tasks, we create a dataset that contains 2,266 manually collected news articles with comments written by experts. We analyze the collected documents and comments regarding characteristic words, the distance to general articles, and contents in the comments. Furthermore, we compare several methods for automating horizon scanning. Our experiments show that 1) manually collected articles are different from general articles regarding the words used and semantic distances, 2) the contents in the comment can be classified into several categories, and 3) a supervised model trained on our dataset achieves a better performance. The contributions are: 1) we propose document retrieval and comment generation tasks for horizon scanning, 2) create and analyze a new dataset, and 3) report the performance of several models and show that comment generation tasks are challenging.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
319–327
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.34
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tatsuya Ishigaki, Suzuko Nishino, Sohei Washino, Hiroki Igarashi, Yukari Nagai, Yuichi Washida, and Akihiko Murai. 2022. Automating Horizon Scanning in Future Studies. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 319–327, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Automating Horizon Scanning in Future Studies (Ishigaki et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.34.pdf