26th March, 2018 - Grenoble, France

Text2Story 2018

First Workshop on Narrative Extraction From Text

Call for papers

The increasing availability of text information in the form of news articles, comments or posts poses new challenges for those who aim to understand the storyline of an event. Although understanding natural language text has improved over the last couple of years with several research works emerging on the grounds of information extraction and text mining, the problem of constructing consistent narrative structures is yet to be solved. We still have a challenging path ahead of us for the development and improvement of algorithms that automatically identify, interpret and relate the different elements of a narrative which will be likely spread from different sources.

In this workshop, we aim to foster the discussion of recent advances in the link between Information Retrieval (IR) and formal narrative representations from texts. More specifically, we aim to capture a wide range of multidisciplinary issues related to the text-to-narrative-structure and to its various related tasks. The workshop will feature a diversity of tasks and techniques with promising results for an exciting task.

Call for papers

The increasing availability of text information in the form of news articles, comments or posts poses new challenges for those who aim to understand the storyline of an event. Although understanding natural language text has improved over the last couple of years with several research works emerging on the grounds of information extraction and text mining, the problem of constructing consistent narrative structures is yet to be solved. We still have a challenging path ahead of us for the development and improvement of algorithms that automatically identify, interpret and relate the different elements of a narrative which will be likely spread from different sources.

In this workshop, we aim to foster the discussion of recent advances in the link between Information Retrieval (IR) and formal narrative representations from texts. More specifically, we aim to capture a wide range of multidisciplinary issues related to the text-to-narrative-structure and to its various related tasks. This is a very rich line of research that poses many challenging problems in information retrieval, text mining, information extraction, computational linguistics and automatic production of media content. Research works submitted to the workshop should foster the scientific advance on all aspects of storyline generation from texts including but not limited to narrative and content generation, formal representation, and visualization of narratives. This includes the following topics:

  • Event Identification
  • Narrative Representation Language
  • Sentiment and Opinion Detection
  • Argumentation Mining
  • Narrative Summarization
  • Storyline Visualization
  • Temporal Aspects of Storylines
  • 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
  • Fact Checking
  • Bots Influence

Key dates

  • Submission deadline: January 22, 2018
  • Review due: February 12, 2018
  • Acceptance Notification Date: February 21, 2018
  • Camera-ready copies: March 5, 2018
  • Workshop: March 26, 2018

Submissions

We invite two kinds of submissions:

  • Research papers (6 pages)
  • Demos and position papers (6 pages)

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

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the programme committee. Participants of accepted papers will be given 15 minutes for short oral presentation. All papers will also be presented in an interactive poster session. We plan to publish the proceedings with CEUR workshop proceedings (potentially indexed on DBLP). A special issue on IPM Journal will also be organized. Relevant papers submitted to the workshop will be invited to be submitted as an extension version to IPM Special issue.

Organization

Organization Committee

  • Alípio M. Jorge (INESC TEC; University of Porto, Portugal)
  • Ricardo Campos (INESC TEC; Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, Tomar, Portugal)
  • Adam Jatowt (Kyoto University, Japan)
  • Sérgio Nunes (INESC TEC; University of Porto, Portugal)

Program Committee

  • Klaus Berberich (Max Planck Institute for Informatics)
  • Marc Spaniol (Normandie University)
  • Miguel Martinez-Alvarez (Signal)
  • Dhruv Gupta (Max Planck Institute for Informatics)
  • Federico Nanni (University of Mannheim)
  • Yihong Zhang (Kyoto University)
  • Udo Kruschwitz (University of Essex)
  • Grace Hui Yang (Georgetown University)
  • Gerasimos Lampouras (The University of Sheffield)
  • Denilson Barbosa (University of Alberta)
  • Sumit Bhatia (IBM)
  • Yating Zhang (Kyoto University)
  • Nina Tahmasebi (University of Gothenburg)
  • Jaime Arguello (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  • Akiko Aizawa (NII)
  • António Horta Branco (University of Lisbon)
  • Bruno Martins (University of Lisbon)
  • Gael Dias (University of Caen)
  • Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto)
  • Pablo Gamallo (University of Santiago de Compostela)
  • Conceição Rocha (INESC TEC)
  • João Paulo Cordeiro (Universidade da Beira Interior)
  • Fernando Batista (INESC-ID & ISCTE-IUL)
  • Álvaro Figueira(INESC TEC & University of Porto)
  • Nuno Moniz (INESC TEC)
  • Paulo Quaresma (University of Evora)
  • Sebastião Pais (Universidade da Beira Interior)
  • Pedro Saleiro (University of Chicago)

Proceedings Chair

  • Conceição Rocha (INESC TEC)
  • João Paulo Cordeiro (Universidade da Beira Interior)

Web and Dissemination Chair

  • Arian Pasquali (University of Porto)
  • Vitor Mangaravite (LIAAD INESC TEC)

Invited Speakers

Prof. Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex

Keynote 1:Users2Story - On the Importance of Understanding Searchers’ Information Needs

Abstract: Uncovering the storyline of events can be of interest for numerous reasons. For example, looking at it through information retrieval glasses (with a touch of personalisation), one might want to string together the various search requests and browsing patterns of an individual user to understand what this user might be after, what information needs are actually hidden behind those queries with the aim of offering better information access support. We all know what interesting stories can actually be derived like this as illustrated by the analysis of the AOL query logs, and the "AOL search data leak” also demonstrates the problems with privacy when analysing user’s Web search logs. If however we move from a Web search scenario to a professional search scenario such as search within an organisation, then we note that privacy issues turn out to be much less of a problem. At the same time, it becomes even more desirable to capture the search and browsing patterns of users because finding information in this context can be very difficult and without understanding the user it can become a very frustrating exercise for the searcher trying to find the document(s) relevant for the task at hand. The talk will explore this use case in some detail and in the best case will be seen as a different take on the main theme of the workshop (and in the worst case will be judged as “off topic” with no chance of re-invitation).

Bio: Udo Kruschwitz is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at the University of Essex. His main research interest is the interface between information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Professor Kruschwitz has successfully led research projects developing algorithms to turn unstructured and partially structured textual data into structured knowledge and user/cohort models that have been applied in a variety of applications including search, navigation and summarisation. He has furthermore been involved as PI and Co-I in successful joint university/industry projects that turned NLP and IR research into practical commercial applications, for example as PI on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project with Signal Media. The collaboration won the Best Knowledge Transfer Partnership Project of the Year Award at InnovateUK's 'Best of the Best 2015' event, and another KTP project with Signal Media has just started.

Prof. Eric Gaussier, University of Grenoble Alps

Keynote 2:Word embeddings, information retrieval and textual entailment

Abstract: Word embeddings currently are one of the preferred representation for words in various NLP and IR tasks. In this talk, we will review the main embeddings used in IR and see to which extent they lead to improved IR performance. We will also discuss the possibility to extend current word embeddings with syntactic information and see the impact of doing so on several NLP tasks.

Bio: Prof. Eric Gaussier is known for his work on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science (DS), in particular for his contributions on models and algorithms to extract information, insights and knowledge from data in various forms. He has worked on three main subfields of AI and DS: machine learning, information retrieval and computational linguistics. He is also interested in modeling how (textual) information is shared in social (content) networks, and how such networks evolve over time. More recently, He has also been working on improving job scheduling techniques through machine learning, and in learning representations for different types of sequences, as texts and Time series.

Programme

Slides are available here and pictures taken during the event are available here.

09:30 – 09:40: Introduction
09:40 – 10:30: [slides] Keynote 1: Users2Story - On the Importance of Understanding Searchers’ Information Needs
(Udo Kruschwitz)
11:00 – 11:30: Coffee break
11:00 – 11:30: [slides] Gossip is more than just story telling Topic modelling and quantitative analysis on a spontaneous speech corpus
(Boróka Pápay, Bálint Kubik and Júlia Galántai)
11:30 – 12:00: [slides] Analyzing Shift in Narratives Regarding Migrants in Europe via Blogosphere
(Muhammad Nihal Hussain, Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Samer Al-Khateeb and Nitin Agarwal)
12:00 – 12:30: [slides] IREvent2Story: A Novel Mediation Ontology and Narrative Generation
(Venumadhav Kattagoni and Navjyoti Singh)
12:30 – 13:00: Poster Session
13:00 – 14:30: Lunch break
14:30 – 15:30: [slides] Keynote 2: Word embeddings, information retrieval and textual entailment
(Eric Gaussier)
15:30 – 16:00: [slides] Text network analysis and visualization of Hungarian, communist-era political reports
(Attila Gulyás, Martina K. Szabó, István Boros Jr. and Gergő Havadi)
16:00 – 16:30: Coffee break
16:30 – 16:50: [slides] Measuring Character-based Story Similarity by Analyzing Movie Scripts
(O-Joun Lee, Nayoung Jo and Jason Jung)
16:50 – 17:10: [slides] Job Recommendation based on Job Seeker Skills: An Empirical Study
(Jorge Valverde-Rebaza, Ricardo Puma, Paul Bustios and Nathalia C. Silva)
17:10 – 18:00: Demo showcase

The Venue

The conference will be held in Grenoble, known as the “Capital of the Alps”, lies in southeastern France, at the foot of the French Alps. Located in the Rhône-Alpes region, Grenoble is the capital of the department of Isère.

More information http://www.ecir2018.org/venue/