April 14th, 2020 - Lisbon, Portugal

Text2Story 2020

Third International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts
held in conjunction with the 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval

Programme COVID19 - Attending Online

Call for papers

Building upon the success of the previous two editions of the workshop (Text2Story@ECIR’18 and Text2Story@ECIR’19 - IPM Journal issue), and the subsequent special issue hosted at IPM journal, we will organize the third edition of the Text2Story Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts at ECIR’20. Although the understanding of natural language has improved over the last couple of years - with research works emerging on the grounds of information extraction and text mining - the problem of constructing consistent narrative structures is yet to be solved.

In the third edition of the workshop, we aim to discuss scientific advances on all aspects of storyline identification from texts including but not limited to narrative extraction and understanding, content generation, formal representation, and visualization of narratives. This includes the following topics (not necessarily complete):

  • Event Identification
  • Narrative Representation
  • Information Retrieval Models based on Story Evolution
  • Narrative-focused Search in Text Collections
  • Temporal Information Retrieval and Narrative Extraction
  • Sentiment and Opinion Detection
  • Argumentation Mining
  • Narrative Summarization
  • Multi-modal Summarization
  • Storyline Visualization
  • Temporal Aspects of Storylines
  • Story Evolution and Shift Detection
  • Causal Relation Extraction and Arrangement
  • Evaluation Methodologies for Narrative Extraction
  • Big data applied to Narrative Extraction
  • Resources and Dataset showcase
  • Personalization and Recommendation
  • User Profiling and User Behavior Modeling
  • Credibility
  • Models for detection and removal of bias in generated stories
  • Ethical and fair narrative generation
  • Fact Checking
  • Bots Influence
  • Bias in Text Documents
  • Automatic Timeline Generation
  • Narratives for explainable AI

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: January 27th, 2020 February 3rd, 2020
  • Acceptance Notification Date: February 18th, 2020 February 28th 2020
  • Camera-ready copies: March 23rd, 2020
  • Workshop: April 14th, 2020

Submissions

We invite two kinds of submissions:

  • Research papers (max 7 pages + references)
  • Demos and position papers (max 5 pages + references)

All papers must be formatted according to the LNCS format style. Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format through our Easy Chair link.

Organization

Organizing Committee

Program Committee

  • Álvaro Figueira (INESC TEC & University of Porto)
  • Andreas Spitz (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)
  • António Horta Branco (University of Lisbon)
  • Arian Pasquali (Signal)
  • Bruno Martins (IST and INESC-ID - Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon)
  • Daniel Gomes (FCT/Arquivo.pt)
  • Daniel Loureiro (University of Porto)
  • Denilson Barbosa (University of Alberta)
  • Dhruv Gupta (Max Planck Institute for Informatics)
  • Dwaipayan Roy (ISI Kolkata, India)
  • Dyaa Albakour (Signal)
  • Gaël Dias (Normandie University)
  • Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto)
  • Ismail Sengor Altingovde (Middle East Technical University)
  • Jeffery Ansah (BHP)
  • Jeremy Pickens (OpenText)
  • João Magalhães (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
  • Kiran Kumar Bandeli (Walmart Inc.)
  • Ludovic Moncla (INSA Lyon)
  • Marc Spaniol (Université de Caen Normandie)
  • Mark Finlayson (Florida International University)
  • Mengdie Zhuang (The University of Sheffield)
  • Nina Tahmasebi (University of Gothenburg)
  • Nuno Moniz (LIAAD/INESC TEC)
  • Pablo Gamallo (University of Santiago de Compostela)
  • Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora)
  • Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI))
  • Ross Purves (University of Zurich)
  • Satya Almasian (Heidelberg University)
  • Sebastiao Miranda (Priberam)
  • Sérgio Nunes (INESC TEC & University of Porto)
  • Udo Kruschwitz (University of Essex)
  • Vítor Mangaravite (UFMG)
  • Yihong Zhang (Kyoto University)

Proceedings Chair

  • João Paulo Cordeiro (INESC TEC; Universidade da Beira do Interior, Covilhã, Portugal)
  • Conceição Rocha (INESC TEC)

Web and Dissemination Chair

  • Arian Pasquali (Signal AI)
  • Behrooz Mansouri (Rochester Institute of Technology)

Invited Speakers

Tailoring Media Monitoring with User Feedback

Speaker: Sebastião Miranda, Head of Development at Priberam

Abstract: Media monitoring is the activity of monitoring the output of the print, online and broadcast media to power the decision-making process of people and organizations (e.g., analysis of emerging technologies, competitive intelligence, public reputation, brand awareness). This is a resource intensive task which raises several challenges – The main issue discussed in this talk is how we can process and aggregate a vast amount of multilingual data to discover relevant stories, entities, topics and events; while at the same time meeting the specific information needs of each user. These can range from monitoring specific entities (competitors, brands, influencers), to coarse topics (e.g. “Aerospace Industry”) and even to fine-grained or ephemeral queries (e.g., “Return of the 737 Max model to service”). In this talk we’ll discuss how we can empower users with relevant and personalized content in the context of the media monitoring setting and introduce the approach Priberam is taking to the problems at hand; in particular by training text retrieval models on-the-fly from user feedback and integrating them in a media monitoring workflow.

Bio: Sebastião Miranda is the Head of Development at Priberam, a Portuguese SME that provides cutting-edge Natural Language Understanding and Artificial Intelligence technologies to companies in the Media, Legal and Healthcare industries. He started working on the problem of Multilingual Media Monitoring in 2016 during the 3-year SUMMA European H2020 research project with media partners British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) and Deutsche Welle, further developed during 2019 to tackle the problem of Technology Watch with Brazilian plane manufacturer Embraer. Sebastião holds an MSc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (University of Lisbon), 2014, and has published work on High Performance Computing, Text Summarization, Entity Recognition and Linking, Crosslingual Clustering, and Fact-Checking.

Recent Advances in Narrative Natural Language Processing

Speaker: Mark Finlayson, Assistant Professor at School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida - US

Abstract: Specific discourse types present their own special challenges across the spectrum of NLP techniques, from models that are trained or tuned on specific types of discourse (e.g., wall street journal articles), to techniques making certain assumptions about the text (e.g., that everything described takes places "in the real world"). The narrative discourse form presents numerous interesting situations that both challenge the capabilities of existing techniques, and also suggest novel, NLP tasks that are specifically relevant to narrative. I review recent progress in the Cognac Laboratory on NLP as applied to narrative. I discuss four tasks. First, story detection, a variation of the text classification task where the goal is to identify whether a text contains a narrative. Second, animacy and character detection, where the goal is to determine whether a referent is animate and is acting as a "character". We see that this approach requires some narratological sophistication to be successful. Third, new improvements in sub-event detection on narrative texts that take advantage of certain important features of narrative discourse. And, fourth, new approaches to timeline extraction that significantly improve our ability to extract, organize, and characterize timelines of events. This collection of results represents concrete steps toward our ability to "do text2story", and points the way forward to an approach to NLP that is truly "narratologically aware."

Bio: Dr. Mark A. Finlayson is Eminent Scholar Chaired Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida. His research intersects artificial intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, and the digital humanities. He directs the Cognac Laboratory whose members focus on advancing the science of narrative, including: understanding the relationship between cognition, narrative, and culture; developing new methods and techniques for investigating questions related to language and narrative; and endowing machines with the ability to understand and use narratives for a variety of applications. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in computer science in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Patrick H. Winston. He also holds the M.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT (2001) and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1998), and served as a research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for 2½ years before coming to FIU. Dr. Finlayson was awarded an NSF CAREER Grant in 2018 in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, and in 2019 was recipient of an IBM Faculty Research Award, as well being named the US Patent and Trademark Office Edison Fellow for Artificial Intelligence. His work has been funded by NSF, NIH, ONR, DHS, and DARPA.

Programme

Click here to download slides. The recorded presentations are available on our Youtube Channel. You can also access a playlist with the talks listed in the same order as the program.
09:00 – 09:20: Introduction
(Ricardo Campos )
Session Chair: Adam Jatowt
09h20 – 10h00 Keynote 1: Tailoring Media Monitoring with User Feedback
(Sebastião Miranda)
Session Chair: Marc Spaniol
10h00 – 10h20 Incorporating Context and Knowledge for Better Sentiment Analysis of Narrative Text
(Chenyang Lyu , Tianbo Ji and Yvette Graham )
10h20 – 10h40 Temporal Embeddings and Transformer Models for Narrative Text Understanding
(Vani Kanjirangat, Simone Mellace and Alessandro Antonucci)
Session Chair: Arian Pasquali
10h40 – 11h00 Measuring Narrative Fluency by Analyzing Dynamic Interaction Networks in Textual Narratives
(O-Joun Lee and Jin-Taek Kim)
11h00 – 11h20 Coffee Break - Breakout Rooms
11h20 – 11h40 Towards a Cross-article Narrative Comparison of News (position Paper)
(Martino Mensio , Alistair Willis and Harith Alani)
Session Chair: Satya Almasian
11h40 – 12h00 Time-centric Exploration of Court Documents
(Philip Hausner, Dennis Aumiller and Michael Gertz)
12h00 – 12h20 Creating Signed Networks of News Events
(Roshni Chakraborty, Srishti Bhandari, Nilotpal Chakraborty and Ritwika Das)
Session Chair: Jeremy Pickens
12h20 – 12h40 Batch Clustering for Multilingual News Streaming
(Mathis Linger and Mhamed Hajaiej)
12h40 – 13h00 Timelines: Entity-centric Event Extraction from Online News (demo)
(Jakub Piskorski, Vanni Zavarella, Martin Atkinson, and Marco Verile)
13h00 – 14h00 Lunch break
14h00 – 15h00 ECIR Keynote
15h00 – 15h15 ECIR Main Conference Coffee Break
Session Chair: Alípio Jorge
15h15 – 15h55 Keynote 2: Recent Advances in Narrative Natural Language Processing
Mark Finlayson
Session Chair: Ismail Sengor Altingovde
15h55 – 16h15 A Framework towards Computational Narrative Analysis on Blogs/Social Media
(Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Muhammad Nihal Hussain and Nitin Agarwal)
16h15 – 16h35 Teargas, Water Cannons and Twitter:A case study on detecting protest repression events in Turkey 2013
(Fatma Elsafoury)
16h35 – 16h50 Coffee Break - Breakout Rooms
Session Chair: Paulo Quaresma
16h50 – 17h10 Breaking the Subtopic Barrier in Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution
(Michael Bugert, Nils Reimers, Shany Barhom, Ido Dagan and Iryna Gurevych)
17h10 – 17h30 Scene Linking Annotation and Automatic Scene Characterization in TV Series
(Aman Berhe, Camille Guinaudeau and Claude Barras)
Session Chair: Sumit Bhatia
17h30 – 17h50 Moving beyond triples (position paper)
(Fabian M. Suchanek)
17h50 – 18h10 Wrap up and Awards
(Ricardo Campos, Alípio Jorge, Adam Jatowt, Sumit Bhatia)

The Venue

Important Information for Participation

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, ECIR2020 and likewise the Text2Story workshop will be an open online event
If you are interested in participating in the text2story workshop proceed as follows.

Before the workshop starts:

  1. To attend the Text2Story online please download Zoom application here: https://zoom.us/ or use Google Play/AppStore to download it for your mobile device.
  2. On April 14th click on the Zoom link (provided upon request) to join our meeting.
  3. We plan to open the room at 08h50 (Lisbon, local time) and to start the workshop at 09h00.
  4. Please be reminded that all the time shown in the program is based on Lisbon standard time. You may use the Time Zone Converter to convert to your local time.
  5. When opening zoom, you can enable the video and audio feature to allow your participation during Q&A time.
  6. When entering the meeting room, please set your display name appropriately so that we can identify you without any problems.

During the Q&A:

  1. Q&A is scheduled after each presentation is completed.
  2. Please note that by default, your audio will be turned off. If you would like to raise a question for the Q&A time, please click the "participants" control and raise hand feature.
  3. In addition to this, you can send a message to the session chair using the chat feature (please do not forget to select the name of the session chair, otherwise your question will be forwarded to everybody. Also, please clearly state which presenter your question is addressed to).
  4. In addition to this, you can send a message to the session chair or the organizers using the chat feature (please do not forget to select the name of the session chair or of the organizer, otherwise your question will be forwarded to everybody. Also, please clearly state which presenter your question is addressed to).
  5. Two breakout rooms (one in the morning session and another one in the afternoon) will also be available so that the audience can interact with the keynote speakers and with presenters in a more informal way.

Useful links:

  1. Zoom website: [http://zoom.us]
  2. Zoom meeting link and password: send an email do ricardo.campos@ipt.pt, should you are interested in attending the workshop.

More information http://www.ecir2020.org/