Narrative event chains

This is a problem to partially order sets of events centered around a common protagonist. Narrative chains are related to structured sequences of participants and events that are called scripts (Schank and Abelson, 1977). For example, (taken from Chambers and Jurafsky (2008)), an example of a narrative chain:

_ accused X

X claimed _

X argued

_ dismissed X

Another example of narrative chain is:

W joined _

W served _

W oversaw _

W resigned

The problem of automatic extraction of narrative event chains can be broken down into three separate sub problems: (1) extraction of events sharing co-referring arguments, (2) temporal ordering of extracted events, (3) pruning and clustering of self-contained chains from the space of events.