In this study, we examine the benefits of incorporating discourse information into document-level temporal dependency parsing. Specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of integrating both high-level discourse profiling information, which describes the discourse function of sentences, and surface-level sentence position information into temporal dependency graph (TDG) parsing. Unexpectedly, our results suggest that simple sentence position information, particularly when encoded using our novel sentence-position embedding method, performs the best, perhaps because it does not rely on noisy model-generated feature inputs. Our proposed system surpasses the current state-of-the-art TDG parsing systems in performance. Furthermore, we aim to broaden the discussion on the relationship between temporal dependency parsing and discourse analysis, given the substantial similarities shared between the two tasks. We argue that discourse analysis results should not be merely regarded as an additional input feature for temporal dependency parsing. Instead, adopting advanced discourse analysis techniques and research insights can lead to more effective and comprehensive approaches to temporal information extraction tasks.

In the midst of a global pandemic, understanding the public’s opinion of their government’s policy-level, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) is a crucial component of the health-policy-making process. Prior work on CoViD-19 NPI sentiment analysis by the epidemiological community has proceeded without a method for properly attributing sentiment changes to events, an ability to distinguish the influence of various events across time, a coherent model for predicting the public’s opinion of future events of the same sort, nor even a means of conducting significance tests. We argue here that this urgently needed evaluation method does already exist. In the financial sector, event studies of the fluctuations in a publicly traded company’s stock price are commonplace for determining the effects of earnings announcements, product placements, etc. The same method is suitable for analysing temporal sentiment variation in the light of policy-level NPIs. We provide a case study of Twitter sentiment towards policy-level NPIs in Canada. Our results confirm a generally positive connection between the announcements of NPIs and Twitter sentiment, and we document a promising correlation between the results of this study and a public-health survey of popular compliance with NPIs.