Abstract
Narrative extraction, understanding, verification, and visualization are currently popular topics for users interested in achieving a deeper understanding of text, researchers who want to develop accurate methods for text mining, and commercial companies that strive to provide efficient tools for that. Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and Computational Linguistics (CL) already offer many instruments that aid the exploration of narrative elements in text and within unstructured data. Despite evident advances in the last couple of years, the problem of automatically representing narratives in a structured form and interpreting them, beyond the conventional identification of common events, entities and their relationships, is yet to be solved. This workshop held virtually on April 10th, 2022 in conjunction with the 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR '22) aims at presenting and discussing current and future directions for IR, NLP, ML and other computational linguistics-related fields capable of improving the automatic understanding of narratives. It includes sessions devoted to research, demo, position papers, work-in-progress, project description, nectar, and negative results papers, keynote talks and space for an informal discussion of the methods, of the challenges and of the future of this research area.

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The Natural Language Processing task of determining Who did what to whom is called Semantic Role Labeling. For English, recent methods based on Transformer models have allowed for major improvements in this task over the previous state of the art. However, for low resource languages, like Portuguese, currently available semantic role labeling models are hindered by scarce training data. In this paper, we explore a model architecture with only a pre-trained Transformer-based model, a linear layer, softmax and Viterbi decoding. We substantially improve the state-of-the-art performance in Portuguese by over 15 F1. Additionally, we improve semantic role labeling results in Portuguese corpora by exploiting cross-lingual transfer learning using multilingual pre-trained models, and transfer learning from dependency parsing in Portuguese, evaluating the various proposed approaches empirically.

Abstract
Narratives are used to convey information and are an important way of understanding the world through information sharing. With the increasing development in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, it becomes relevant to explore new techniques to extract, process, and visualize narratives. Narrative visualization tools enable a news story reader to have a different perspective from the traditional format, allowing it to be presented in a schematic way, using representative symbols to summarize it. We propose a new narrative visualization approach using icons to represent important narrative elements. The proposed visualization is integrated in Brat2Viz, a narrative annotation visualization tool that implements a pipeline that transforms text annotations into formal representations leading to narrative visualizations. To build the icon visualization, we present a narrative element extraction process that uses automatic sentence extraction, automatic translation methods, and an algorithm that determines the actors' most adequate descriptions. Then, we introduce a method to create an icon dictionary, with the ability to automatically search for icons. Furthermore, we present a critical analysis and user-based evaluation of the results resorting to the responses collected in two separate surveys.

Abstract
Social media platforms are used to discuss current events with very complex narratives that become difficult to understand. In this work, we introduce Tweet2Story, a web app to automatically extract narratives from small texts such as tweets and describe them through annotations. By doing this, we aim to mitigate the difficulties existing on creating narratives and give a step towards deeply understanding the actors and their corresponding relations found in a text. We build the web app to be modular and easy-to-use, which allows it to easily incorporate new techniques as they keep getting developed.