Abstract
For seven years, the Text2Story Workshop series has fostered a vibrant community dedicated to understanding narrative structure in text, resulting in significant contributions to the field and developing a shared understanding of the challenges in this domain. While traditional methods have yielded valuable insights, the advent of Transformers and LLMs have ignited a new wave of interest in narrative understanding. The previous iteration of the workshop also witnessed a surge in LLM-based approaches, demonstrating the community’s growing recognition of their potential. In this eighth edition we propose to go deeper into the role of LLMs in narrative understanding. While LLMs have revolutionized the field of NLP and are the go-to tools for any NLP task, the ability to capture, represent and analyze contextual nuances in longer texts is still an elusive goal, let alone the understanding of consistent fine-grained narrative structures in text. Consequently, this iteration of the workshop will explore the issues involved in using LLMs to unravel narrative structures, while also examining the characteristics of narratives generated by LLMs. By fostering dialogue on these emerging areas, we aim to continue the workshop's tradition of driving innovation in narrative understanding research. Text2Story encompasses sessions covering full research papers, work-in-progress, demos, resources, position and dissemination papers, along with one keynote talk. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

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Abstract
In healthcare, diagnoses usually rely on physician expertise. However, complex cases may benefit from consulting similar past clinical reports cases. In this paper, we present MedLink (http://medlink.inesctec.pt), a tool that given a free-text medical report, retrieves and ranks relevant clinical case reports published in health conferences and journals, aiming to support clinical decision-making, particularly in challenging or complex diagnoses. To this regard, we trained two BERT models on the sentence similarity task: a bi-encoder for retrieval and a cross-encoder for reranking. To evaluate our approach, we used 10 medical reports and asked a physician to rank the top 10 most relevant published case reports for each one. Our results show that MedLink’s ranking model achieved NDCG@10 of 0.747. Our demo also includes the visualization of clinical entities (using a NER model) and the production of a textual explanation (using a LLM) to ease comparison and contrasting between reports. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
Nowadays, humanity generates and contributes to form large and complex datasets, going from documents published on media outlets, posts on social media or location-based information. The generated information tends to be complex, heterogeneous (texts, images, videos, etc.) and is growing at an incredible pace, with much of this data having a strong spatial and temporal focus. This steady increase in the availability of such a volume of information, forces the development of more effective user interfaces that would assist users in efficient visualization, analysis and exploration of the data. This half-day workshop on User Interfaces for Spatial and Temporal Data Analysis (UISTDA) held in conjunction with the IUI2018 conference on March 11th, aimed at sharing the latest progress and developments, current challenges and potential applications for exploiting large amounts of spatial and temporal data. In this paper we provide an overview of the workshop goals together with its main contributions. © 2018 Copyright for the individual papers remains with the authors.

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Reasoning about spatial information is fundamental in natural language to fully understand relationships between entities and/or between events. However, the complexity underlying such reasoning makes it hard to represent formally spatial information. Despite the growing interest on this topic, and the development of some frameworks, many problems persist regarding, for instance, the coverage of a wide variety of linguistic constructions and of languages. In this paper, we present a proposal of integrating ISO-Space into a ISO-based multilayer annotation scheme, designed to annotate news in European Portuguese. This scheme already enables annotation at three levels, temporal, referential and thematic, by combining postulates from ISO 24617-1, 4 and 9. Since the corpus comprises news articles, and spatial information is relevant within this kind of texts, a more detailed account of space was required. The main objective of this paper is to discuss the process of integrating ISO-Space with the existing layers of our annotation scheme, assessing the compatibility of the aforementioned parts of ISO 24617, and the problems posed by the harmonization of the four layers and by some specifications of ISO-Space. © European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

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