Abstract: Event detection is the course of extracting useful information from a large amount of incomplete， unknown in advance, but potentially useful information, it is summarized into event. Since the event detection has many common attributes to topic detection and tracking, information retrieval, information extraction and other natural language processing, and has the superiority of predicting the development of event, it gradually becomes a research hotspot of current event identifying. This paper introduces the research background, task definition and related algorithms of the event detection, especially the lexical semantic chaining’s correlation algorithm. After analyzing the research situation of current event detection field, points out the trend of development in future.

Key words: event detection, lexical semantic chaining, cluster