Complex news events, such as natural disasters and socio-political conflicts, require swift responses from the government and society. Relying on historical events to project the future is insufficient as such events are sparse and do not cover all possible conditions and nuanced situations. Simulation of these complex events can help better prepare and reduce the negative impact. We develop a controllable complex news event simulator guided by both the event schema representing domain knowledge about the scenario and user-provided assumptions representing case-specific conditions.As event dynamics depend on the fine-grained social and cultural context, we further introduce a geo-diverse commonsense and cultural norm-aware knowledge enhancement component.To enhance the coherence of the simulation, apart from the global timeline of events,we take an agent-based approach to simulate the individual character states, plans, and actions. By incorporating the schema and cultural norms, our generated simulations achieve much higher coherence and appropriateness and are received favorably by participants from a humanitarian assistance organization.

In this paper, we present RESIN-EDITOR, an interactive event graph visualizer and editor designed for analyzing complex events. Our RESIN-EDITOR system allows users to render and freely edit hierarchical event graphs extracted from multimedia and multi-document news clusters with guidance from human-curated event schemas. RESIN-EDITOR’s unique features include hierarchical graph visualization, comprehensive source tracing, and interactive user editing, which significantly outperforms existing Information Extraction (IE) visualization tools in both IE result analysis and general model improvements. In our evaluation of RESIN-EDITOR, we demonstrate ways in which our tool is effective in understanding complex events and enhancing system performances. The source code, a video demonstration, and a live website for RESIN-EDITOR have been made publicly available.