NECE: Narrative Event Chain Extraction Toolkit

Abstract

NECE is an event-based text analysis toolkit built for narrative documents. NECE aims to provide users open and easy accesses to an event-based summary and abstraction of long narrative documents through both a graphic interface and a python package, which can be readily used in narrative analysis, understanding, or other advanced purposes. Our work addresses the challenge of long passage events extraction and temporal ordering of key events; at the same time, it offers options to select and view events related to narrative entities, such as main characters and gender groups. We conduct human evaluation to demonstrate the quality of the event chain extraction system and character features mining algorithms. Lastly, we shed light on the toolkit's potential downstream applications by demonstrating its usage in gender bias analysis and Question-Answering tasks.