Methods for managing, validating and retrieving event-related information in evolving contexts

Events have always been fundamental building blocks of individual lives as well as of the whole world. Nowadays, thanks to the several technological advances achieved within the digital age, the processes of capturing, describing and spreading events have never been so simple and intuitive. This results in an ubiquitous presence of event-related information, which is digitally embedded in any form of media. Both the pervasiveness of such information as well as the benefits of its exploitation for many purposes have fostered decades of research effort to detect and summarize it. However, several issues emerge at subsequent stages and shall be addressed to support the proper exploitation and consumption of event-related information. The work presented within this thesis is indeed committed to this goal. The aforementioned ubiquity of events makes them exhibit different characteristics and appear in a diverse range of scenarios. Therefore, we categorize events according to three main aspects that come into play when considering the management and usage of event-related information over time, once it has been created. These are the degree of privacy, as events can be of public domain or rather pertain to a more personal sphere, the type of description, which is the form (e.g. textual or visual) in which events are described, and the time of usage, namely the temporal horizon over which event-related information is expected to be accessed and used. The problems addressed in this thesis regard different combinations of such aspects, each one subject to specific issues to be dealt with. Concerning the private sphere, we aim at properly managing large amounts of photographs taken during personal events, so that they can be easily revisited and enjoyed in the future. The common habit of dumping every single picture, encouraged by the availability of cheap storage devices, poses serious threats to their future revisiting and calls for more selective strategies to identify the