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++ DEADLINE EXTENSION ++ **************************************************************************** Eighth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'25)
Held in conjunction with the 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR'25)
April 10th, 2025 – Lucca, Italy
Website: https://text2story25.inesctec.pt ****************************************************************************
++ Important Dates ++ - Submission Deadline: January 31st, 2025 January 24th, 2025 - Acceptance Notification: March 3rd, 2025 - Camera-ready copies: March 17th, 2025 - Workshop: April 10th, 2025
++ Overview ++ For seven years, the Text2Story Workshop series has fostered a vibrant community dedicated to understanding narrative structure in text, resulting in significant contributions to the field and developing a shared understanding of the challenges in this domain. While traditional methods have yielded valuable insights, the advent of Transformers and LLMs have ignited a new wave of interest in narrative understanding. In the eighth edition of the Text2Story workshop, we propose to go deeper into the role of LLMs in narrative understanding exploring the issues involved in using LLMs to unravel narrative structures, while also examining the characteristics of narratives generated by LLMs. By fostering dialogue on these emerging areas, we aim to identify the wide-ranging issues related to the narrative extraction task and continue the workshop's tradition of driving innovation in narrative understanding research.
++ List of Topics ++ Research works submitted to the workshop should advance the scientific understanding of all aspects of narrative extraction from texts. This includes, but is not limited to, topics such as narrative information extraction, formal representation of narratives, narrative analysis and generation, development of datasets and evaluation protocols, as well as ethics and bias in narratives, and narrative applications. We encourage the submission of high-quality and original submissions covering the following topics and contributions focused on low and medium-resource languages.
Narrative Information Extraction - Identification of Participants, Events and Temporal Expressions - Identification of Participants, Events and Temporal Expressions - Temporal Reasoning and Ordering of Events - Causality Detection - Big Data Applied to Narrative Extraction - LLMs for Narrative Extraction
Narrative Representation - Annotation Protocols - Narrative Representation Models - Lexical, Syntactic, and Semantic Ambiguity in Narrative Representation - LLM-learned Representation
Narrative Analysis and Generation - Discourse and Argument Structure Analysis - Narrative analysis of LLM generated text - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Narrative Analysis - Story Evolution and Shift Detection - Automatic Timeline Generation - Generative Language Models for Narrative Generation
Datasets and Evaluation Protocol - Evaluating LLM-Generated Narratives - Evaluation of Multimodal Narrative Models - Annotated datasets - Narrative Resources - Using LLMs for Data Creation and Augmentation
Ethics and Bias in Narratives - Identifying and Mitigating Bias in Generated Narratives - Ethical and Fair Narrative Generation - Misinformation and Fact Checking - Bias in LLM-generated narratives
Narrative Applications - Narrative-focused Search in Text Collections - Narrative Summarization - Narrative Q&A - Multimodal Narrative Summarization - Multimodal Narrative-focused Search - Sentiment and Opinion Detection in Narratives - Social Media Narratives - Narrative Text Simplification - Narrative-based Text Anonymization - Personalization and Recommendation of Narratives - Storyline Visualization (including multimodal) and Narrative Structures
++ Objectives ++ Overall, the workshop has the following main objectives: (1) raise awareness within the Information Retrieval (IR) community regarding the challenges posed by narrative extraction and comprehension; (2) bridge the gap and foster connections between academic research, practitioners, and industrial applications; (3) discuss new methods, recent advances, and emerging challenges; (4) share experiences from research projects, case studies, and scientific outcomes structured around fundamental research questions related to narrative understanding; (5) identify dimensions that might be influenced by the automation of the narrative process; (6) highlight tested hypotheses that did not result in the expected outcomes
++ Submission Guidelines ++ We expect contributions from researchers on all aspects of narrative extraction, representation, analysis, and generation. This includes the extraction and formal representation of events, their temporal and causal relationships, and methods for temporal reasoning and ordering. Submissions focusing on narrative comprehension, such as the analysis of generated narratives, are also highly encouraged. Additionally, we welcome innovative approaches to presenting narrative information, including automatic timeline generation, multi-modal narrative summarization, and narrative visualization. Research addressing misinformation and the verification of extracted facts, evaluation methodologies, and the development of annotated datasets, annotation schemas, and evaluation metrics is particularly valued. Finally, we are especially interested in submissions that focus on low and medium-resource languages, as well as multilingual and cross-lingual narrative analysis.
Building on these themes, several pressing questions emerge within the field, offering valuable guidance for authors in shaping their submissions.How can we better integrate multimodal content - combining text, images, videos, and audio - into cohesive narratives? What strategies can reliably extract or generate accurate narratives from large, multi-genre, and multi-lingual datasets? How can systems dynamically adapt to real-time shifts in narratives as the volume of generated content grows? What methodologies can effectively annotate data and evaluate novel approaches, for complex tasks such as visualization but also for characterization of multi-lingual narratives? How can we guarantee the explainability, interpretability, and coherence of narratives across diverse domains and languages? To what extent can novel approaches be generalized to new tasks, genres, and languages with minimal effort? What ethical safeguards are essential to ensure that narrative extraction systems are not misused for propaganda or manipulation? How can challenges posed by ambiguous or contradictory information within narratives be addressed through innovative methods? What role do cultural and contextual nuances play in narrative extraction, and how can these be effectively incorporated into automated systems to ensure greater inclusivity? How can collaboration between human annotators and automated systems be optimized to achieve more accurate, nuanced narrative understanding? How can systems generate concise, evidence-backed explanations to justify the dominant narrative while remaining grounded in the source text?
-> Full papers (up to 8 pages + references): Original and high-quality unpublished contributions to the theory and practical aspects of the narrative extraction task. Full papers should introduce existing approaches, describe the methodology and the experiments conducted in detail. Negative result papers to highlight tested hypotheses that did not get the expected outcome are also welcomed.
-> Short papers (up to 5 pages + references): Unpublished short papers describing work in progress; position papers introducing a new point of view, a research vision or a reasoned opinion on the workshop topics; and dissemination papers describing project ideas, ongoing research lines, case studies or summarized versions of previously published papers in high-quality conferences/journals that is worthwhile sharing with the Text2Story community, but where novelty is not a fundamental issue.
-> Demos | Resource Papers (up to 5 pages + references): Unpublished papers presenting research/industrial demos; papers describing important resources (datasets or software packages) to the text2story community;
Papers submitted to Text2Story 2025 should be original work and different from papers that have been previously published, accepted for publication, or that are under review at other venues. Exceptions to this rule are "dissemination papers". Pre-prints submitted to ArXiv are eligible.
All papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer-review process by at least two members of the programme committee. The accepted papers will appear in the proceedings published at CEUR workshop proceedings (indexed in Scopus and DBLP) as long as they don't conflict with previous publication rights.
++ Invited Speakers ++ Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Title: Revisiting frames for event extraction in the Digital Humanities
Abstract: Frame Semantics as a cognitive linguistic theory was first formalised by Charles Fillmore around 50 years ago. Since then, it has been adapted to different application scenarios as a framework to support event-based information extraction. But what is the role of frames in the era of generative AI? In this talk I will present some recent research works in which frame semantics has been tailored to support digital humanities research. In particular, we explored the use of frames to extract sensory information from historical archives and capture shifts in perception over time. Frame-based event extraction has also been investigated as a way to navigate news collections, build narratives from event chains and present the same event from different points of view.
Bio: Sara Tonelli is the head of the Digital Humanities research group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento (Italy) and holds a Phd in Language Sciences from Università Ca' Foscari, Venice. Between 2021 and 2024 she served as Liaison Representative of the ACL Special Interest Group on Language Technologies for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (SIGHUM) and she is currently part of the board of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC). In the last years, she has served as area chair and senior area chair for major *ACL conferences in tracks related to cultural analytics, social media analysis, digital humanities and offensive language detection. She has also participated in different EU-funded projects around disinformation, computational social science and cultural heritage and was scientific coordinator of the KID ACTIONS European project (2021-2022), aimed at addressing cyberbullying among children and adolescents through interactive education and gamification. Her research interests focus on understanding how people communicate on social media and what dynamics are involved in online attacks, as well as what kind of biases can affect this analysis. She is also interested in using NLP to extract information from digital archives to address historical and cultural heritage research questions.
++ Organizing committee ++ Ricardo Campos (INESC TEC; University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal) Alípio M. Jorge (INESC TEC; University of Porto, Portugal) Adam Jatowt (University of Innsbruck, Austria) Sumit Bhatia (Media and Data Science Research Lab, Adobe) Marina Litvak (Shamoon Academic College of Engineering, Israel)
++ Proceedings Chair ++ João Paulo Cordeiro (NOVA Lincs & University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal) Conceição Rocha (INESC TEC, Portugal)
++ Web and Dissemination Chair ++ Hugo Sousa (INESC TEC & University of Porto, Portugal) Behrooz Mansouri (University of Maine, USA)
++ Program Committee ++ Abhai Singh (Amazon) Ali Salehi (University at Buffalo) Arian Pasquali (Faktion AI) Andreas Spitz (University of Konstanz) Antoine Doucet (Université de La Rochelle) António Horta Branco (University of Lisbon) Bart Gajderowicz (University of Toronto) Behrooz Mansouri (Rochester Institute of Technology) Brenda Santana (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) Brucce dos Santos (Computational Intelligence Laboratory (LABIC) - ICMC/USP) Bruno Martins (IST & INESC-ID, University of Lisbon) David Semedo (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) Dennis Aumiller (Cohere) Dhruv Gupta (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) Evelin Amorim (INESC TEC) Sérgio Matos (University of Aveiro) Florian Boudin (Nantes University) Henrique Lopes Cardoso (LIACC & University of Porto) Irina Rabaev (Shamoon College of Engineering) Ismail Altingovde (Middle East Technical University) Junbo Huang (University of Hamburg) Jakub Piskorski (Polish Academy of Sciences) João Paulo Cordeiro (Nova lincs & University of Beira Interior) Jin Zhao (Brandeis University) Luca Cagliero (Politecnico di Torino) Ludovic Moncla (INSA Lyon) Luis Filipe Cunha (INESC TEC & University of Minho) Marc Finlayson (Florida International University) Marc Spaniol (Université de Caen Normandie) Moreno La Quatra (Kore University of Enna) Nianwen Xue (Brandeis University) Nuno Guimarães (INESC TEC & University of Porto) Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora) Paul Rayson (Lancaster University) Purificação Silvano (CLUP & University of Porto) Ross Purves (University of Zurich) Sérgio Nunes (INESC TEC & University of Porto) Sriharsh Bhyravajjula (University of Washington) Udo Kruschwitz (University of Regensburg) Valentina Bartalesi (ISTI-CNR, Italy) Yangyang Chen (Brandeis University)
++ Contacts ++ Website: https://text2story25.inesctec.pt For general inquiries regarding the workshop, reach the organizers at: text2story2025@easychair.org