ExcavatorCovid: Extracting Events and Relations from Text Corpora for Temporal and Causal Analysis for COVID-19

Bonan Min, Benjamin Rozonoyer, Haoling Qiu, Alexander Zamanian, Nianwen Xue, Jessica MacBride


Abstract
Timely responses from policy makers to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on a comprehensive grasp of events, their causes, and their impacts. These events are reported at such a speed and scale as to be overwhelming. In this paper, we present ExcavatorCovid, a machine reading system that ingests open-source text documents (e.g., news and scientific publications), extracts COVID-19 related events and relations between them, and builds a Temporal and Causal Analysis Graph (TCAG). Excavator will help government agencies alleviate the information overload, understand likely downstream effects of political and economic decisions and events related to the pandemic, and respond in a timely manner to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. We expect the utility of Excavator to outlive the COVID-19 pandemic: analysts and decision makers will be empowered by Excavator to better understand and solve complex problems in the future. A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/528619007.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-demo.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Heike Adel, Shuming Shi
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
63–71
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bonan Min, Benjamin Rozonoyer, Haoling Qiu, Alexander Zamanian, Nianwen Xue, and Jessica MacBride. 2021. ExcavatorCovid: Extracting Events and Relations from Text Corpora for Temporal and Causal Analysis for COVID-19. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 63–71, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ExcavatorCovid: Extracting Events and Relations from Text Corpora for Temporal and Causal Analysis for COVID-19 (Min et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.8.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.8.mp4