Cross-Document Narrative Alignment of Environmental News: A Position Paper on the Challenge of Using Event Chains to Proxy Narrative Features

Ben Miller


Abstract
Cross-document event chain co-referencing in corpora of news articles would achieve increased precision and generalizability from a method that consistently recognizes narrative, discursive, and phenomenological features such as tense, mood, tone, canonicity and breach, person, hermeneutic composability, speed, and time. Current models that capture primarily linguistic data such as entities, times, and relations or causal relationships may only incidentally capture narrative framing features of events. That limits efforts at narrative and event chain segmentation, among other predicate tasks for narrative search and narrative-based reasoning. It further limits research on audience engagement with journalism about complex subjects. This position paper explores the above proposition with respect to narrative theory and ongoing research on segmenting event chains into narrative units. Our own work in progress approaches this task using event segmentation, word embeddings, and variable length pattern matching in a corpus of 2,000 articles describing environmental events. Our position is that narrative features may or may not be implicitly captured by current methods explicitly focused on events as linguistic phenomena, that they are not explicitly captured, and that further research is required.
Anthology ID:
W18-4303
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop Events and Stories in the News 2018
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A
Editors:
Tommaso Caselli, Ben Miller, Marieke van Erp, Piek Vossen, Martha Palmer, Eduard Hovy, Teruko Mitamura, David Caswell, Susan W. Brown, Claire Bonial
Venue:
EventStory
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18–24
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4303
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ben Miller. 2018. Cross-Document Narrative Alignment of Environmental News: A Position Paper on the Challenge of Using Event Chains to Proxy Narrative Features. In Proceedings of the Workshop Events and Stories in the News 2018, pages 18–24, Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Document Narrative Alignment of Environmental News: A Position Paper on the Challenge of Using Event Chains to Proxy Narrative Features (Miller, EventStory 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4303.pdf