  News agencies produce thousands of multimedia stories describing events
happening in the world that are either scheduled such as sports competitions,
political summits and elections, or breaking events such as military conflicts,
terrorist attacks, natural disasters, etc. When writing up those stories,
journalists refer to contextual background and to compare with past similar
events. However, searching for precise facts described in stories is hard. In
this paper, we propose a general method that leverages the Wikidata knowledge
base to produce semantic annotations of news articles. Next, we describe a
semantic search engine that supports both keyword based search in news articles
and structured data search providing filters for properties belonging to
specific event schemas that are automatically inferred.
