Event structures are central in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence research: 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 similar to narratives, which are at the heart of information sharing. But it remains difficult to automatically detect events or automatically construct stories from such event representations. This book explores how to handle today's massive news streams and provides multidimensional, multimodal, and distributed approaches, like automated deep learning, to capture events and narrative structures involved in a 'story'. This overview of the current state-of-the-art on event extraction, temporal and casual relations, and storyline extraction aims to establish a new multidisciplinary research community with a common terminology and research agenda. Graduate students and researchers in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and media studies will benefit from this book.

'Events are a key aspect of language meaning and the storylines underlying discourse. This book presents an accessible and comprehensive examination of events in language - from the philosophical and linguistic foundations to state of the art computational techniques for identifying, representing and reasoning about events and storylines.'

James Allen - University of Rochester and Institute of Human and Machine Cognition

'There is no technology with more potential to revolutionise digital media than the computational processing of stories. This comprehensive guide covers the field of event and storyline analysis from first principles to the state of the art. Anyone doing technical work in news innovation or future media should read this.'

David Caswell - Executive Product Manager, BBC News Labs

'Finally, a compendium of key, state-of-the-art ideas in narrative understanding, allowing researchers to see the big picture. Caselli, Hovy, Palmer, and Vossen have not only assembled key papers, but also created a beautiful conceptual overview of the field – a must-read for any researcher interested in narratives and storylines.'

Peter Clark - Allen Institute for AI