Recent advances in information and networking technologies have contributed significantly to global connectivity and greatly facilitated and fostered information creation, distribution, and access. The resultant ever-increasing volume of online textual documents creates an urgent need for new text mining techniques that can intelligently and automatically extract implicit and potentially useful knowledge from these documents for decision support. This research focuses on identifying and discovering event episodes together with their temporal relationships that occur frequently (referred to as evolution patterns in this study) in sequences of documents. The discovery of such evolution patterns can be applied in such domains as knowledge management and used to facilitate existing document management and retrieval techniques (e.g., event tracking). Specifically, we propose and design an evolution pattern (EP) discovery technique for mining evolution patterns from sequences of documents. We experimentally evaluate our proposed EP technique in the context of facilitating event tracking. Measured by miss and false alarm rates, the evolution-pattern supported event-tracking (EPET) technique exhibits better tracking effectiveness than a traditional event-tracking technique. The encouraging performance of the EPET technique demonstrates the potential usefulness of evolution patterns in supporting event tracking and suggests that the proposed EP technique could effectively discover event episodes and evolution patterns in sequences of documents.