Computational Analysis of Storylines

Event structures have been at the heart of Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. People can easily refer to changes in the world, identify their participants, distinguish relevant information, and have expectations of what can happen next. Part of this process is based on mechanisms which are similar to narratives. Narratives provide means for understanding and organizing information by creating connections that form storylines. Such narrative structures are at the heart of information sharing. But it remains extraordinarily difficult to detect events automatically, let alone to automatically construct stories from such event representations. Handling today's massive news streams demands multidimensional, multimodal, distributed approaches to capture events and narrative structures involved in a "story". The book explores these topics, both by providing materials for a better understanding of the state-of-the-art as well as by highlighting the pending challenges in the area of events and storylines.Current research in this area is lively but fragmented and, for some topics (e.g. storyline representation and evaluation) still at early stages.""--