The survey paper “One, no one and one hundred thousand events: Defining and processing events in an inter-disciplinary perspective” written by Rachele Sprugnoli and Sara Tonelli has been accepted for publication on the Natural Language Engineering (NLE) journal.

Abstract:

We present an overview of event definition and processing spanning 25 years of research in NLP. We first provide linguistic background to the notion of event, and then present past attempts to formalize this concept in annotation standards to foster the development of benchmarks for event extraction systems. This ranges from MUC-3 in 1991 to the Time and Space Track challenge at SemEval 2015. Besides, we shed light on other disciplines in which the notion of event plays a crucial role, with a focus on the historical domain. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive study on event definitions and investigate which potential past efforts in the NLP community may have in a different research domain. We present the results of a questionnaire, where the notion of event for historians is put in relation to the NLP perspective.

Keywords:

temporal information processing, digital history, event detection

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324916000292

Timeline of evaluation campaigns (above) and workshops (below) in the field of event detection and processing.