Event-Centric Temporal Knowledge Graph Construction: A Survey

Abstract

Textual documents serve as representations of discussions on a variety of subjects. These discussions can vary in length and may encompass a range of events or factual information. Present trends in constructing knowledge bases primarily emphasize fact-based common sense reasoning, often overlooking the temporal dimension of events. Given the widespread presence of time-related information, addressing this temporal aspect could potentially enhance the quality of common-sense reasoning within existing knowledge graphs. In this comprehensive survey, we aim to identify and evaluate the key tasks involved in constructing temporal knowledge graphs centered around events. These tasks can be categorized into three main components: (a) event extraction, (b) the extraction of temporal relationships and attributes, and (c) the creation of event-based knowledge graphs and timelines. Our systematic review focuses on the examination of available datasets and language technologies for addressing these tasks. An in-depth comparison of various approaches reveals that the most promising results are achieved by employing state-of-the-art models leveraging large pre-trained language models. Despite the existence of multiple datasets, a noticeable gap exists in the availability of annotated data that could facilitate the development of comprehensive end-to-end models. Drawing insights from our findings, we engage in a discussion and propose four future directions for research in this domain. These directions encompass (a) the integration of pre-existing knowledge, (b) the development of end-to-end systems for constructing event-centric knowledge graphs, (c) the enhancement of knowledge graphs with event-centric information, and (d) the prediction of absolute temporal attributes.