Steps towards a system to extract formal narratives from text

In this paper we present a first step towards a system to extract for- mal narratives from text. This work is part of a wider research on the introduction of narratives in Digital Libraries. We represent narratives as networks of events, each set in space and time, endowed with factual components, and linked to each other through semantic relations. In order to extract a narrative from text, the first step is to automatically detect and classify the events in the text. We present a software we developed that uses neural networks for event detection and classifica- tion. It was trained on a dataset of annotated biographies of writers and artists from the English Wikipedia and on the ACE 2005 training corpus. We tested the software on the biography of Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. This software constitutes the first component of a broader system for narrative extraction from natural language text.