Event Templates for Improved Narrative Understanding in Question Answering Systems

摘要

Understanding narrative text is more than simple information extraction on a sentence-by-sentence basis. To comprehend the true meaning of a narrative requires determining the connections between the sentences and the effect of one event on other events. This story understanding process can be greatly enhanced by the use of event descriptor templates that begin with the basic journalistic questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how but that go beyond these simple basics to address more complex relationships: role playing, context, impact, causality, and interests. Previously, representing story narratives as knowledge representations has required intensive manual effort on the part of trained knowledge engineers to correctly encode the contents of stories into a knowledge base (KB). For large volumes of text, this becomes impractical, limiting the usefulness of KB-based systems in question answering. This paper describes a method of automating the narrative representation process by using event descriptor templates to elicit critical narrative information to be encoded in a knowledge-based system.