It's the Same Old Story! Enriching Event-Centric Knowledge Graphs by Narrative Aspects

Abstract: Our lives are ruled by events of varying importance ranging from simple everyday occurrences to incidents of societal dimension. And a lot of effort is taken to exchange information and discuss about such events: generally speaking, stringent narratives are formed to reduce complexity. But when considering complex events like the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine it is easy to see that those events cannot be grasped by objective facts alone, like the start of the conflict or respective troop sizes. There are different viewpoints and assessments to consider, a different understanding of the roles taken by individual participants, etc. So how can such subjective and viewpoint-dependent information be effectively represented together with all objective information? Recently event-centric knowledge graphs have been proposed for objective event representation in the otherwise primarily entity-centric domain of knowledge graphs. In this paper we introduce a novel and lightweight structure for event-centric knowledge graphs, which for the first time allows for queries incorporating viewpoint-dependent and narrative aspects. Our experiments prove the effective incorporation of subjective attributions for event participants and show the benefits of specifically tailored indexes for narrative query processing.