Stories or narratives are comprised of a sequence of events. To compose interesting stories, professional writers often leverage a creative writing technique called *flashback* that inserts past events into current storylines as we commonly observe in novels and plays. However,  it is challenging for machines to generate *flashback* as it requires a solid understanding of event **temporal order** (e.g. *feeling hungry* before *eat*, not vice versa), and the creativity to arrange storylines so that earlier events do not always appear first in **narrative order**. Two major issues in existing systems that exacerbate the challenges: 1) temporal bias in pertaining and story datasets that leads to monotonic event temporal orders; 2) lack of explicit guidance that helps machines decide where to insert *flashbacks*. We propose to address these issues using structured storylines to encode events and their pair-wise temporal relations (before, after and vague) as **temporal prompts** that guide how stories should unfold temporally. We leverage a Plan-and-Write framework enhanced by reinforcement learning to generate storylines and stories end-to-end. Evaluation results show that the proposed method can generate more interesting stories with *flashbacks* while maintaining textual diversity, fluency, and temporal coherence.

Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Prompts

While pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved noticeable success on many NLP tasks, they still struggle for tasks that require event temporal reasoning, which is essential for event-centric applications. We present a continual pre-training approach that equips PTLMs with targeted knowledge about event temporal relations. We design self-supervised learning objectives to recover masked-out event and temporal indicators and to discriminate sentences from their corrupted counterparts (where an event or temporal indicators got replaced). By further pre-training a PTLM with these objectives jointly, we reinforce its attention to the event and temporal information, yielding enhanced capability on event temporal reasoning. This effective continual pre-training framework for event temporal reasoning (ECONET) improves the PTLMs' fine-tuning performances across five relation extraction and question answering tasks and achieves new or on-par state-of-the-art performances in most of our downstream tasks.

ECONET: Effective Continual Pretraining of Language Models for Event Temporal Reasoning

Stories and narratives are composed based on a variety of events. Understanding how these events are semantically related to each other is the essence of reading comprehension. Recent event-centric reading comprehension datasets focus on either event arguments or event temporal commonsense. Although these tasks evaluate machines' ability of narrative understanding, human-like reading comprehension requires the capability to process event-based semantics beyond arguments and temporal commonsense. For example, to understand causality between events, we need to infer motivations or purposes; to understand event hierarchy, we need to parse the composition of events. To facilitate these tasks, we introduce ESTER, a comprehensive machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset for Event Semantic Relation Reasoning. We study the five most commonly used event semantic relations and formulate them as question answering tasks. Experimental results show that the current SOTA systems achieve 60.5%, 57.8%, and 76.3% for event-based F1, token-based F1, and HIT@1 scores respectively, which are significantly below human performances.

ESTER: A Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset for Reasoning about Event Semantic Relations

We present EventPlus, a temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates various state-of-the-art event understanding components including event trigger and type detection, event argument detection, event duration and temporal relation extraction. Event information, especially event temporal knowledge, is a type of common sense knowledge that helps people understand how stories evolve and provides predictive hints for future events. EventPlus as the first comprehensive temporal event understanding pipeline provides a convenient tool for users to quickly obtain annotations about events and their temporal information for any user-provided document. Furthermore, we show EventPlus can be easily adapted to other domains (e.g., biomedical domain). We make EventPlus publicly available to facilitate event-related information extraction and downstream applications.


EventPlus: A Temporal Event Understanding Pipeline

There has been a steady need in the medical community to precisely extract the temporal relations between clinical events. In particular, temporal information can facilitate a variety of downstream applications such as case report retrieval and medical question answering. Existing methods either require expensive feature engineering or are incapable of modeling the global relational dependencies among the events. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Clinical Temporal ReLation Exaction with Probabilistic Soft Logic Regularization and Global Inference (CTRL-PG) to tackle the problem at the document level. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, I2B2-2012 and TB-Dense, demonstrate that CTRL-PG significantly outperforms baseline methods for temporal relation extraction.

Clinical Temporal Relation Extraction with Probabilistic Soft Logic Regularization and Global Inference


**Tracks:**
* Dialogue and Interactive Systems
* Language Generation
* Summarization



Virtual PS2 - 6G: Group 1

poster

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

NAACL 2022

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Virtual Poster Session II: Information Extraction

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

**Session Chair: **Ajay Nagesh 
**In Person Volunteer:** Sara Papi 
** Remote Volunteer:** Amit Kumar

7D: Resources and Evaluation 3

technical paper

10F-Oral: System Demonstrations

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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NAACL 2021

Main Track

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Rujun Han

5

4

SHORT BIO

Presentations

Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Prompts

ECONET: Effective Continual Pretraining of Language Models for Event Temporal Reasoning

ESTER: A Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset for Reasoning about Event Semantic Relations

EventPlus: A Temporal Event Understanding Pipeline

Clinical Temporal Relation Extraction with Probabilistic Soft Logic Regularization and Global Inference

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