Vrittanta-EN: A Benchmark Dataset for Event Trigger Detection and Classification Advancing Event Understanding in English Narrative Discourse

Chaitanya Kirti, Ashish Anand, Prithwijit Guha


Abstract
Event trigger detection and classification involve identifying meaningful occurrences and categorizing them into predefined event types within narrative text. Despite extensive research on English event extraction in factual domains like news and biomedical text, narrative prose, such as short stories, has received comparatively little attention. To bridge this gap, Vrittanta-EN introduces a manually annotated English corpus comprising 11,272 event instances extracted from diverse short stories. The dataset captures a wide range of communicative, cognitive, and physical actions typical of narrative discourse. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across a wide range of models, including classical machine learning baselines (SVM, Naive Bayes), neural sequential models (LSTM, BiLSTM, BiLSTM-CRF), encoder-only transformers (BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, DistilBERT, DeBERTa, ELECTRA), and encoder-decoder models (T5, BART), along with large language models (GPT-4.1, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, Claude Sonnet 4) under both zero-shot and five-shot settings. Experimental results show that ELECTRA achieved the highest overall performance for event trigger detection with an F1-score of 90.61%, while RoBERTa demonstrated superior performance for event classification with a macro F1 of 74.71%. These findings highlight the robustness of contextual transformer-based architectures for modeling narrative event structures in English short stories. The dataset, code, and annotation guidelines will be publicly released upon paper acceptance.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.616
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
7755–7765
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-616
DOI:
10.63317/25s8ijb2orwm
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chaitanya Kirti, Ashish Anand, and Prithwijit Guha. 2026. Vrittanta-EN: A Benchmark Dataset for Event Trigger Detection and Classification Advancing Event Understanding in English Narrative Discourse. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7755–7765, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Vrittanta-EN: A Benchmark Dataset for Event Trigger Detection and Classification Advancing Event Understanding in English Narrative Discourse (Kirti et al., LREC 2026)
Copy Citation: