The digital landscape is rapidly evolving with an ever-increasing volume of online news, emphasizing the need for swift and precise analysis of complex events.We refer to the complex events composed of many news articles over an extended period as Temporal Complex Event (TCE). This paper proposes a novel approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) to systematically extract and analyze the event chain within TCE, characterized by their key points and timestamps. We establish a benchmark, named TCELongBench, to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in handling temporal dynamics and understanding extensive text. This benchmark encompasses three distinct tasks - reading comprehension, temporal sequencing, and future event forecasting. In the experiment, we leverage retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) method and LLMs with long context window to deal with lengthy news articles of TCE. Our findings indicate that models with suitable retrievers exhibit comparable performance with those utilizing long context window.

Tracking dialogue states to better interpret user goals and feed downstream policy learning is a bottleneck in dialogue management. Common practice has been to treat it as a problem of classifying dialogue content into a set of pre-defined slot-value pairs, or generating values for different slots given the dialogue history. Both have limitations on considering dependencies that occur on dialogues, and are lacking of reasoning capabilities. This paper proposes to track dialogue states gradually with reasoning over dialogue turns with the help of the back-end data. Empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of joint belief accuracy for MultiWOZ 2.1, a large-scale human–human dialogue dataset across multiple domains.