EVENT REPORT

Report on the 4th International Workshop on
Narrative Extraction from Texts(Text2Story 2021) at ECIR 2021
Ricardo Campos
INESC TEC, Portugal
Ci2 - Smart Cities Research Center,
Polytechnic Inst. of Tomar, Portugal
Adam Jatowt
Univ. of Innsbruck
Austria

Alı́pio M. Jorge
INESC TEC,
Portugal FCUP
Univ. of Porto, Portugal

Sumit Bhatia
Media and Data Science Research Lab,
Adobe, India
Sumit.Bhatia@adobe.com

Mark Finlayson
Florida International Univ.,USA

João Paulo Cordeiro
INESC TEC, Portugal
Univ. of Beira Interior, Portugal

Conceição Rocha
INESC TEC, Portugal
Behrooz Mansouri
Rochester Inst. of Technology,
Rochester, NY, USA

Alexandre Ribeiro
INESC TEC, Portugal
Jeffery Ansah
BHP, Australia

Arian Pasquali
CitizenLab, Belgium

Abstract
The Fourth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story’21) was
held on the April 1st , 2021, in conjunction with the 43rd European Conference on Information
Retrieval (ECIR 2021). Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, the workshop was held online on Zoom
platform. During the course of the day, an average of more than 80 attendees had the opportunity to follow-up and discuss the recent advances in extraction and formal representationof narratives. The workshop consisted of two invited keynotes and ten paper presentations.
The proceedings of the workshop are available online at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2860/
Date: 1 April, 2021.
Website: https://text2story21.inesctec.pt/.

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Figure 1: Overview of the Text2Story2021 Online Workshop

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Introduction

The Text2Story series of Workshops started with the aims of bringing together researchers fromdiverse, related fields such as IR, NLP, AI, design and visualization to come together and share
the recent advances in their respective fields towards narrative understanding. Building upon the
success of the past editions [Jorge et al., 2018, 2019a; Campos et al., 2020] and on the Text2Story
Special Issue at IPM Journal [Jorge et al., 2019b], this year, we organized the fourth editionof the Text2Story workshop, held online (see Figure 1) under the umbrella of ECIR 2021. This
report summarizes the key activities at the workshop. We owe the workshop success to the diverse
set of participants, from academia and industry, who established a new record of more than 80
attendees (on average) during all day and approximately 120 participants. The enthusiasm andactive participation of the attendees, ensured that the virtual edition of the workshop was asintellectually stimulating as the past physical editions. The workshop program included a totalof 10 research papers (out of 20 submissions) from 48 authors and two invited keynote talks. The
videos1 and presentation slides2 of the talks at the workshop are available online.
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https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUa5fBAPctfRuJh_ZyeZkQ5CI1Z_IVX6h
https://text2story21.inesctec.pt/slides/text2story21_workshop_slides.zip

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The Program

The workshop program consisted of two invited keynote talks, six regular research papers and one
demonstration. In addition, we also had work-in-progress, project description and nectar papers
that allowed the respective authors to present their ongoing work and get useful feedback fromthe workshop attendees. The papers presented at the workshop covered diverse aspects of thenarrative extraction problem ranging from tools and frameworks to enable annotate and visualize
narratives in text to applications covering identifying disinformation about COVID-19 pandemic.

2.1

KeynotesJosé Alves and Célia Rodrigues from Jornal Pùblico3 , a leading Portuguese newspaper, presented, with the help of various examples, how they use the art of visual storytelling to present
information to the readers in a compelling and engaging way [Alves and Rodrigues, 2021]. The
second keynote by Leila Zia, Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation 4 , was organized in
the form of an interactive session where she described various streams of research at the Wikimedia
foundation and how narrative science can help improve the quality of content in various Wikimedia
projects . The questions asked by the attendees also covered a multitude of topics covering bias,
dis-information, and availability of resources and datasets from the Wikimedia foundation [Zia,2021].

2.2

Tools and Frameworks for Narrative Detection and Extraction

Amorim et al. [2021] presented Brat2Viz – a tool that displays the visualization of narrative
information of an input text annotated in by the Brat annotation framework. The presentationof the narrative annotations in visual format helps the end-user easily grasp various narrative
elements (such as actors and events) and semantic links between these elements. Alrashid andGaizauskas [2021] presented learnings from their efforts in annotating narrative scenes in text
using the SceneML framework. They found the task to be feasible and recommend several areasof improvement in designing task guidelines that can help improve inter-annotator agreement.
Finally, Kroll et al. [2021] presented a demonstration of their system to automatically bind thenarrative elements in text to external knowledge repositories such as Wikidata and PubMed.

2.3

Interpreting and Understanding Narratives

Gervás [2021] discussed the notion of embedding stories – stories told by a character in a story
and argued for the need of computational models to represent such embedded stories within themain storyline. He then proposed a simplified model to account for the recursive structure ofembedded stories in text and presented various directions of future work. Oza and Dietz [2021]
presented an approach for identifying key entities in a story and found that entity co-occurrencesin text to be a strong indicator of connection strength between the identified entities.
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https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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2.4

Applications

Catipon and Savas [2021] presented a very timely study comparing the differences between conservative narratives on Twitter and Parler. Their analysis found that the media bias levels arehigher for users on Parler than Twitter. They also noted that topics which are more moderated
on Twitter gather very divergent views on Parler. Further, they also found that influential news
sources are more politically varied on Parler. Hussain et al. [2021] presented a narrative visualization tool that can help an analyst discover the various themes and their associated narratives
being discussed in various blogs. Rosa et al. [2021] presented THEaiTRE 1.0, a system basedon GPT-2 to generate theatre play scripts.

2.5

Ongoing Research Efforts

The workshop also included special tracks for work-in-progress and position papers to offer aplatform for authors to share initial results of their research efforts and gather useful feedback
from the community. Marcoux and Agarwal [2021] presented their ongoing efforts on tracking
spread of disinformation regarding COVID-19 across various online information sources. They
also made findings of their study as well as misinformation stories identified are available to the
public5 . Vijayaraghavan and Vijayaraghavan [2021] presented their efforts towards modeling social
media narratives about caste-related news stories. Mori et al. [2021] presented an approach foranalysing incomplete stories and identifying positions of missing information. This is an importanttask as automated story generation methods can then generate missing parts of a story to produce
a complete story.

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Key Contributors

The Program Chairs were Ricardo Campos, Alı́pio Jorge, Adam Jatowt, Sumit Bhatia, and Mark
Finlayson. The proceedings were setup by our Proceedings Chairs João Paulo Cordeiro andConceição Rocha. Arian Pasquali, Behrooz Mansouri, Alexandre Ribeiro, and Jeffery Ansah were
the web and dissemination chairs. In addition to this, we had six session chairs who brilliantly
moderated the presentation of the papers. Our thanks go to Jannik Strötgen (Bosch Center
for Artificial Intelligence, Germany), João Magalhães (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), Bruno
Martins (IST and INESC-ID - Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon) and Sérgio Nunes(INESC TEC & University of Porto). Finally, we would like to acknowledge the effort and valuable
contribution of the researchers and industry experts that have served on the Program Committeeof the Text2Story’21 workshop. Our thanks go to:• Álvaro Figueira (INESC TEC & University of Porto)• Andreas Spitz (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)• António Horta Branco (University of Lisbon)• Arian Pasquali (CitizenLab)• Brenda Santana (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul)
• Bruno Martins (IST and INESC-ID – Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon)
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• Daniel Gomes (FCT/Arquivo.pt)• Daniel Loureiro (University of Porto)• Denilson Barbosa (University of Alberta)• Deya Banisakher (Florida International University)• Dhruv Gupta (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU))• Dwaipayan Roy (ISI Kolkata)• Evelin Amorim (INESC TEC)
• Florian Boudin (Université de Nantes)• Gaël Dias (Université de Caen Normandie)• Grigorios Tsoumakas (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)• Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto)• Ismail Sengor Altingovde (Middle East Technical University)• Jeffery Ansah (BHP)• Jeremy Pickens (OpenText)• João Paulo Cordeiro (INESC TEC; Universidade da Beira do Interior)• Kiran Kumar Bandeli (Walmart Inc.)• Ludovic Moncla (INSA Lyon)• Marc Spaniol (Université de Caen Normandie)• Nina Tahmasebi (University of Gothenburg)• Nuno Moniz (INESC TEC & University of Porto)• Pablo Gamallo (University of Santiago de Compostela)• Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Evora)• Preslav Nakov (Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI))• Ross Purves (University of Zurich)• Satya Almasian (Heidelberg University)• Sérgio Nunes (INESC TEC & University of Porto)• Udo Kruschwitz (University of Regensburg)• Yihong Zhang (Osaka University)• Yating Zhang (Alibaba)• Sebastião Miranda (Priberam)4

Recognition Awards

The workshop ended with the announcement of the recognition awards. The Text2Story 2021
Best Paper Award went to Regina Catipon and Onur Savas for their paper entitled A Different
Story: How Conservative Narratives Diverge Between Twitter and Parler. In addition to this, theworkshop chairs have recognized the following researchers as recipients of the 2021 reviewer award
for their insightful and valuable reviews - Brenda Santana (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande
do Sul), Bruno Martins (IST and INESC-ID – Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon),Deya Banisakher (Florida International University).

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5Concluding Thoughts

This was the fourth edition of the Text2Story workshop series. We started with an objective
to bring together the interested participants from different geographies and research expertise tocollectively set the agenda for the emerging multi-disciplinary area of narrative extraction fromtexts. We are overwhelmed from the increasingly positive response from the research community
and the growing participation in the workshops underlines the relevance of the topic. The fifth
edition of the Text2Story workshop 6 will be held in conjunction with ECIR 2022 7 and we invite
the interested reader to be a part of the workshop.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the ECIR 2021 organizers for helping us to organize the workshop, ourwonderful keynote speakers, members of the program committee, the paper authors, and theparticipants who made the workshop a grand success.

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