Lifelogging has gained more attention due to its wide applications, such as personalized recommendations or memory assistance. The issues of collecting and extracting personal life events have emerged. People often share their life experiences with others through conversations. However, extracting life events from conversations is rarely explored. In this paper, we present Life Event Dialog, a dataset containing fine-grained life event annotations on conversational data. In addition, we initiate a novel Conversational Life Event Extraction task and differentiate the task from the public event extraction or the life event extraction from other sources like microblogs. We explore three information extraction (IE) frameworks to address the Conversational Life Event Extraction task: OpenIE, relation extraction, and event extraction. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the three baselines is established. The results suggest that the current event extraction model still struggles with extracting life events from human daily conversations. Our proposed Life Event Dialog dataset and in-depth analysis of IE frameworks will facilitate future research on life event extraction from conversations.

Explaining the reasoning of neural models has attracted attention in recent years. Providing highly-accessible and comprehensible explanations in natural language is useful for humans to understand model’s prediction results. In this work, we present a pilot study to investigate explanation generation with a narrative and causal structure for the scenario of health consulting. Our model generates a medical suggestion regarding the patient’s concern and provides an explanation as the outline of the reasoning. To align the generated explanation with the suggestion, we propose a novel discourse-aware mechanism with multi-task learning. Experimental results show that our model achieves promising performances in both quantitative and human evaluation.

When recalling life experiences, people often forget or confuse life events, which necessitates information recall services. Previous work on information recall focuses on providing such assistance reactively, i.e., by retrieving the life event of a given query. Proactively detecting the need for information recall services is rarely discussed. In this paper, we use a human-annotated life experience retelling dataset to detect the right time to trigger the information recall service. We propose a pilot model—structured event enhancement network (SEEN) that detects life event inconsistency, additional information in life events, and forgotten events. A fusing mechanism is also proposed to incorporate event graphs of stories and enhance the textual representations. To explain the need detection results, SEEN simultaneously provides support evidence by selecting the related nodes from the event graph. Experimental results show that SEEN achieves promising performance in detecting information needs. In addition, the extracted evidence can be served as complementary information to remind users what events they may want to recall.