Cross-Document Narrative Alignment of Environmental News: A Position Paper on the Challenge of Using Event Chains to Proxy Narrative Features

Cross-document event chain co-referencing in corpora of news articles would achieve increased precision and generalizability from a method that consistently recognizes narrative, discursive, and phenomenological features such as tense, mood, tone, canonicity and breach, person, hermeneutic composability, speed, and time. Current models that capture primarily linguistic data such as entities, times, and relations or causal relationships may only incidentally capture narrative framing features of events. That limits efforts at narrative and event chain segmentation, among other predicate tasks for narrative search and narrative-based reasoning. It further limits research on audience engagement with journalism about complex subjects. This position paper explores the above proposition with respect to narrative theory and ongoing research on segmenting event chains into narrative units. Our own work in progress approaches this task using event segmentation, word embeddings, and variable length pattern matching in a corpus of 2,000 articles describing environmental events. Our position is that narrative features may or may not be implicitly captured by current methods explicitly focused on events as linguistic phenomena, that they are not explicitly captured, and that further research is required.