Semantic Relations between Text Segments for Semantic Storytelling: Annotation Tool - Dataset - Evaluation

Semantic Storytelling describes the goal to automatically and semi-automatically generate stories based on extracted, processed, classified and annotated information from large content resources. Essential is the automated processing of text segments extracted from different content resources by identifying the relevance of a text segment to a topic and its semantic relation to other text segments. In this paper we present an approach to create an automatic classifier for semantic relations between extracted text segments from different news articles. We devise custom annotation guidelines based on various discourse structure theories and annotate a dataset of 2,501 sentence pairs extracted from 2,638 Wikinews articles. For the annotation, we developed a dedicated annotation tool. Based on the constructed dataset, we perform initial experiments with Transformer language models that are trained for the automatic classification of semantic relations. Our results with promising high accuracy scores suggest the validity and applicability of our approach for future Semantic Storytelling solutions.