WORKSHOP REPORTECIR 2018: Text2Story Workshop - Narrative Extraction from Texts
Alípio Jorge1,2, Ricardo Campos1,3, Adam Jatowt4 , Sérgio Nunes1,2
Conceição Rocha1, João Paulo Cordeiro1,5
Arian Pasquali1,2 and Vitor Mangaravite1
1

INESC TEC, LIAAD and CSIG, Porto, Portugal

2

University of Porto - FCUP and FEUP, Porto, Portugal

3

Polytechnic Institute of Tomar – Smart Cities Research Center, Tomar, Portugal
4

Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

5

University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal

amjorge@fc.up.pt, ricardo.campos@ipt.pt, adam@dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp, sergio.nunes@fe.up.pt

Abstract
The 1st International Workshop on Narrative Extraction fromTexts (Text2Story 2018) was held in conjunction with the40th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR
2018, Grenoble on the 26th March 2018. The workshop aimed
to help foster the collaboration of researchers on a wide rangeof multidisciplinary issues related to the text-to-narrativestructure. The program consisted of two keynote talks, six
research presentations, a poster session and a slot for demopresentations. This report briefly summarizes the workshop.
More information about the workshop is available athttp://text2story18.inesctec.pt

1Introduction

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 research works emerging on thegrounds 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 andimprovement of algorithms that automatically identify, interpret and relate the different elements of anarrative, either in a single text or spread among different sources. The aim of this workshop was tofoster the discussion of recent advances in the intersection between Information Retrieval (IR) andformal narrative representations from texts. More specifically, it was our intention to capture a wide
range of multidisciplinary issues related to the text-to-narrative-structure and to its various related
tasks. The workshop featured a diversity of tasks and techniques with promising results.
We had four full papers and two short papers selected by the programme committee from a total of 11submissions. In addition to the selected papers, the workshop featured two invited speakers. UdoKruschwitz on “Users2Story - On the Importance of Understanding Searchers’ Information Needs”,
and Eric Gaussier, who addressed “Word embeddings, information retrieval and textual entailment”.

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A special issue of the Information Processing & Management (IPM) Journal is planned on the topicsof the workshop.
The worskshop chairs were Alípio Jorge, Ricardo Campos, Adam Jatowt and Sérgio Nunes. The
proceedings were setup by our Proceedings Chairs Conceição Rocha and João Paulo Cordeiro and areavailable at CEUR (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2077/). Arian Pasquali was our web chair(http://text2story18.inesctec.pt) and Vitor Mangaravite was responsible for workshop information
dissemination.

2Keynote by Udo Kruschwitz

The program started with a keynote talk given by Udo Kruschwitz from University of Essex focusedon uncovering the storyline of events. On this keynote talk Udo discussed the various search andbrowsing patterns of a user on the web and on a corporate information retrieval system, which could
give us a better understanding of the user's actual information needs. Log files were also discussed asa useful resource to build user profiles.

3Keynote by Eric Gaussier

The other talk was given on the afternoon session of the workshop by Eric Gaussier from theUniversity of Grenoble Alps. The talk focused on one of the currently preferred representations forwords in various NLP and IR tasks. In this presentation, Eric reviewed the main embedding
approaches used in IR and explained to which extent they lead to improved IR performance. The
possibility to extend current word embeddings with syntactic information and the impact of doing so
in the context of different NLP tasks were also discussed.

4Paper Presentations

We had 6 research presentations by Venumadhav Kattagoni, Júlia Galántai, Attila Gulyás,
Muhammad Nihal Hussain, Jason J. Jung and Jorge Valverde-Rebaza. The accepted papers have thefollowing titles and authors and can be found at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2077 :• "IREvent2Story: A Novel Mediation Ontology and Narrative Generation" by VenumadhavKattagoni and Navjyoti Singh;• "Gossip is More than Just Story Telling Topic Modelling and Quantitative Analysis on aSpontaneous Speech Corpus" by Boróka Pápay, Bálint Kubik and Júlia Galántai;• "Text Network Analysis and Visualization of Hungarian, Communist-era Political Reports"
by Attila Gulyás, Martina K. Szabó, István Boros Jr. and Gergő Havadi;• "Analyzing Shift in Narratives Regarding Migrants in Europe via Blogosphere" byMuhammad Nihal Hussain, Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Samer Al-Khateeb, Nitin Agarwal;• "Measuring Character-based Story Similarity by Analyzing Movie Scripts" by O-Joun Lee,Nayoung Jo and Jason J. Jung;• "Job Recommendation Based on Job Seeker Skills: An Empirical Study" by Jorge ValverdeRebaza, Ricardo Puma, Paul Bustios and Nathalia C. Silva.

5Poster Session

In our poster session presenters of the papers and attendees of the workshop had the opportunity todiscuss their research and interact in a more informal way, networking and socializing. This was avery dynamic session.

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6Demo Session

The workshop ended with two demo presentations from Adam Jatowt and Vitor Mangaravite. The
first one was designed for discovering the story of word semantic evolution based on Google Booksdata. Vitor presented the YAKE!1 keyword extractor, a new approach to extract keywords from single
documents which was awarded the Best Short Paper of the ECIR’18 conference.

7Programme Committee

The following researchers and industry experts have served on the Programme Committee ofText2Story 2018:••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

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)

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank ECIR2018 organizers for helping us to organize the workshop, our keynote speakers,
the program committee, the paper authors, and the participants. This work is partially funded by the ERDF
through the COMPETE 2020 Programme within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961, and by National
Funds through the FCT as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013 and of project UID/MAT/00212/2013. It wasalso financed by MIC SCOPE (171507010) and by Project “TEC4Growth - Pervasive Intelligence, Enhancers
and Proofs of Concept with Industrial Impact/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000020” which is financed by theNORTE 2020, under the Portugal 2020, and through the ERDF.

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http://bit.ly/YakeDemoECIR2018

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