Abstract:
Events and character extraction from narratives is a fundamental task in text analysis. The application of event extraction techniques ranges from the summarization of different documents to the analysis of medical notes. We identify events based on a framework named “four W” (Who, What, When, Where) to capture all the essential components like the actors, actions, time, and places. In this paper, we explore two prominent techniques for event extraction: statistical parsing of syntactic trees and semantic role labeling. While these techniques were investigated by different researchers in isolation, we directly compare the performance of the two approaches on our custom dataset, which we have annotated.
Our analysis shows that statistical parsing of syntactic trees outperforms semantic role labeling in event and character extraction, especially in identifying specific details. Nevertheless, semantic role labeling demonstrate good performance in correct actor identification. We evaluate the effectiveness of both approaches by comparing different metrics like precision, recall, and F1-scores, thus, demonstrating their respective advantages and limitations.
Moreover, as a part of our work, we propose different future applications of event extraction techniques that we plan to investigate. The areas where we want to apply these techniques include code analysis and source code authorship attribution. We consider using event extraction to retrieve key code elements as variable assignments and function calls, which can further help us to analyze the behavior of programs and identify the project’s contributors. Our work provides novel understandings of the performance and efficiency of statistical parsing and semantic role labeling techniques, offering researchers new directions for the application of these techniques.
Keywords:event extraction, natural language processing, statistical parsing, semantic role labeling
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