Every Object Tells a Story

James Pustejovsky, Nikhil Krishnaswamy


Abstract
Most work within the computational event modeling community has tended to focus on the interpretation and ordering of events that are associated with verbs and event nominals in linguistic expressions. What is often overlooked in the construction of a global interpretation of a narrative is the role contributed by the objects participating in these structures, and the latent events and activities conventionally associated with them. Recently, the analysis of visual images has also enriched the scope of how events can be identified, by anchoring both linguistic expressions and ontological labels to segments, subregions, and properties of images. By semantically grounding event descriptions in their visualization, the importance of object-based attributes becomes more apparent. In this position paper, we look at the narrative structure of objects: that is, how objects reference events through their intrinsic attributes, such as affordances, purposes, and functions. We argue that, not only do objects encode conventionalized events, but that when they are composed within specific habitats, the ensemble can be viewed as modeling coherent event sequences, thereby enriching the global interpretation of the evolving narrative being constructed.
Anthology ID:
W18-4301
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop Events and Stories in the News 2018
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A
Editors:
Tommaso Caselli, Ben Miller, Marieke van Erp, Piek Vossen, Martha Palmer, Eduard Hovy, Teruko Mitamura, David Caswell, Susan W. Brown, Claire Bonial
Venue:
EventStory
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–6
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4301
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
James Pustejovsky and Nikhil Krishnaswamy. 2018. Every Object Tells a Story. In Proceedings of the Workshop Events and Stories in the News 2018, pages 1–6, Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Every Object Tells a Story (Pustejovsky & Krishnaswamy, EventStory 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4301.pdf