  We present a method called TIMEMACHINE to generate a timeline of events and
relations for entities in a knowledge base. For example for an actor, such a
timeline should show the most important professional and personal milestones
and relationships such as works, awards, collaborations, and family
relationships. We develop three orthogonal timeline quality criteria that an
ideal timeline should satisfy: (1) it shows events that are relevant to the
entity; (2) it shows events that are temporally diverse, so they distribute
along the time axis, avoiding visual crowding and allowing for easy user
interaction, such as zooming in and out; and (3) it shows events that are
content diverse, so they contain many different types of events (e.g., for an
actor, it should show movies and marriages and awards, not just movies). We
present an algorithm to generate such timelines for a given time period and
screen size, based on submodular optimization and web-co-occurrence statistics
with provable performance guarantees. A series of user studies using Mechanical
Turk shows that all three quality criteria are crucial to produce quality
timelines and that our algorithm significantly outperforms various baseline and
state-of-the-art methods.
