In this paper, we advocate the use of Message Sequence Chart (MSC) as a knowledge representation to capture and visualize multi-actor interactions and their temporal ordering. We propose algorithms to automatically extract an MSC from a history narrative. For a given narrative, we first identify verbs which indicate interactions and then use dependency parsing and Semantic Role Labelling based approaches to identify senders (initiating actors) and receivers (other actors involved) for these interaction verbs. As a final step in MSC extraction, we employ a state-of-the art algorithm to temporally re-order these interactions. Our evaluation on multiple publicly available narratives shows improvements over four baselines.

Analyzing customer feedback is the best way to channelize the data into new marketing strategies that benefit entrepreneurs as well as customers. Therefore an automated system which can analyze the customer behavior is in great demand. Users may write feedbacks in any language, and hence mining appropriate information often becomes intractable. Especially in a traditional feature-based supervised model, it is difficult to build a generic system as one has to understand the concerned language for finding the relevant features. In order to overcome this, we propose deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based approaches that do not require handcrafting of features. We evaluate these techniques for analyzing customer feedback sentences on four languages, namely English, French, Japanese and Spanish. Our empirical analysis shows that our models perform well in all the four languages on the setups of IJCNLP Shared Task on Customer Feedback Analysis. Our model achieved the second rank in French, with an accuracy of 71.75% and third ranks for all the other languages.

Event timeline serves as the basic structure of history, and it is used as a disposition of key phenomena in studying history as a subject in secondary school. In order to enable a student to understand a historical phenomenon as a series of connected events, we present a system for automatic event timeline generation from history textbooks. Additionally, we propose Message Sequence Chart (MSC) and time-map based visualization techniques to visualize an event timeline. We also identify key computational challenges in developing natural language processing based applications for history textbooks.