We introduce a new task, MultiMedia Event Extraction, which aims to extract events and their arguments from multimedia documents. We develop the first benchmark and collect a dataset of 245 multimedia news articles with extensively annotated events and arguments. We propose a novel method, Weakly Aligned Structured Embedding (WASE), that encodes structured representations of semantic information from textual and visual data into a common embedding space. The structures are aligned across modalities by employing a weakly supervised training strategy, which enables exploiting available resources without explicit cross-media annotation. Compared to uni-modal state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves 4.0% and 9.8% absolute F-score gains on text event argument role labeling and visual event extraction. Compared to state-of-the-art multimedia unstructured representations, we achieve 8.3% and 5.0% absolute F-score gains on multimedia event extraction and argument role labeling, respectively. By utilizing images, we extract 21.4% more event mentions than traditional text-only methods.

We present the first comprehensive, open source multimedia knowledge extraction system that takes a massive stream of unstructured, heterogeneous multimedia data from various sources and languages as input, and creates a coherent, structured knowledge base, indexing entities, relations, and events, following a rich, fine-grained ontology. Our system, GAIA, enables seamless search of complex graph queries, and retrieves multimedia evidence including text, images and videos. GAIA achieves top performance at the recent NIST TAC SM-KBP2019 evaluation. The system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with a narrated video that documents the system.