This work focuses on the spatial dimension of narrative understanding and presents the task of event-location tracking in narrative texts. The task intends to extract the sequence of locations where the narrative is set through its progression. We present several architectures for the task that seeks to model the global structure of the sequence, with varying levels of context awareness. We compare these methods to several baselines, including the use of strong methods applied over narrow contexts. We also develop methods for the generation of location embeddings and show that learning to predict a sequence of continuous embeddings, rather than a string of locations, is advantageous in terms of performance. We focus on the test case of Holocaust survivor testimonies. We argue for the moral and historical importance of studying this dataset in computational means and that it provides a unique case of a large set of narratives with a relatively restricted set of location trajectories. Our results show that models that are aware of the larger context of the narrative can generate more accurate location chains. We further corroborate the effectiveness of our methods by showing similar trends from experiments on an additional domain.

The task of topical segmentation is well studied, but previous work has mostly addressed it in the context of structured, well-defined segments, such as segmentation into paragraphs, chapters, or segmenting text that originated from multiple sources. We tackle the task of segmenting running (spoken) narratives, which poses hitherto unaddressed challenges. As a test case, we address Holocaust survivor testimonies, given in English. Other than the importance of studying these testimonies for Holocaust research, we argue that they provide an interesting test case for topical segmentation, due to their unstructured surface level, relative abundance (tens of thousands of such testimonies were collected), and the relatively confined domain that they cover. We hypothesize that boundary points between segments correspond to low mutual information between the sentences proceeding and following the boundary. Based on this hypothesis, we explore a range of algorithmic approaches to the task, building on previous work on segmentation that uses generative Bayesian modeling and state-of-the-art neural machinery. Compared to manually annotated references, we find that the developed approaches show considerable improvements over previous work.

We present the task of Automated Punishment Extraction (APE) in sentencing decisions from criminal court cases in Hebrew. Addressing APE will enable the identification of sentencing patterns and constitute an important stepping stone for many follow up legal NLP applications in Hebrew, including the prediction of sentencing decisions. We curate a dataset of sexual assault sentencing decisions and a manually-annotated evaluation dataset, and implement rule-based and supervised models. We find that while supervised models can identify the sentence containing the punishment with good accuracy, rule-based approaches outperform them on the full APE task. We conclude by presenting a first analysis of sentencing patterns in our dataset and analyze common models’ errors, indicating avenues for future work, such as distinguishing between probation and actual imprisonment punishment. We will make all our resources available upon request, including data, annotation, and first benchmark models.