Automated Event Extraction in the Domain of Border Security Martin Atkinson 1 , Jakub Piskorski 2 , Hristo Tanev 1 , Eric van der Goot 1 , Roman Yangarber 3 , and Vanni Zavarella 1 1 Joint Research of the European Commission, 21027 Ispra (VA), Italy {Firstname.Lastname,Firstname.Multi-word-lastname}@jrc.ec.europa.eu 2 Frontex, Rondo ONZ 1, Warsaw, Poland Firstname.Lastname@frontex.europa.eu 3 University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 68, 00014 Helsinki, Finland Firstname.Lastname@cs.helsinki.fi Abstract. This paper gives an overview of an ongoing effort to con- struct tools for automating the process of extracting structured informa- tion about border-security related events from on-line news. The paper describes our overall approach to the problem, the system architecture and event information access and moderation. Keywords: event extraction from on-line news, border security, text analysis, open source intelligence. 1 Introduction Mining open sources for gathering intelligence for security purposes is becoming increasingly important. Recent advances in the field of automatic content extrac- tion from natural-language text result in a growing application of text-mining technologies in the field of security, for extracting valuable structured knowledge from massive textual data sets on the Web. This paper gives an overview of an ongoing effort to construct tools for Frontex 1 for automating and facilitat- ing the process of extracting structured information on border-security related events from on-line news articles. The topics in focus include illegal immigration incidents (e.g., illegal entry, illegal stay and exit, refusal of entry), cross-border criminal activities (e.g., trafficking, forced labour), terrorist attacks, other violent events (e.g., kidnappings), inland arrests in third countries, displacements, troop movements, man-made and natural disasters, outbreak of infectious disease, and other crisis-related events. The need of strengthening capabilities for tracking the security situation in the source and target countries for illegal immigration into the EU has been identified and acknowledged by the European Commission (EC). Specifically, the Commission Communication COM (2008) 68 proposes the creation of an 1 Frontex is the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union. P. Daras and O. Mayora (Eds.): UCMedia 2009, LNICST 40, pp. 321–326, 2010. c  Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010