Homo Narrans: From Information to Narratives
                                Jochen L. Leidner
                                Coburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany




                                Abstract
                                Humans are curious creatures, equipped with a sense of (and desire for) finding meaning in their
                                environment. They are predisposed to identify patterns, real and spurious, in the world they live
                                in, and above anything else, they understand the world in terms of narratives. In this talk, we
                                will explore a set of questions about narratives: what is a narrative made up of? What signals
                                from textual prose tell us what the narrative is? What about signals from structured data that
                                imply a particular narrative? What is the essence of a story? How can narrative information be
                                extracted and presented? Open source intelligence analysts and investigative reporters alike are
                                hunting for the story, the narrative, behind the petabyte intercepts or terabyte leaks. The more
                                data we gather or have available, the stronger will be our thirst to distill meaningful stories
                                from it.


                                Short Bio
                                Professor Jochen L. Leidner MA MPhil PhD FRGS is the Research Professor for Explainable and
                                Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Insurance at Coburg University of Applied Sciences and
                                Arts, Germany, where he leads the Information Access Research Group, a Visiting Professor of
                                Data Analytics in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield and founder
                                and CEO of the consultancy KnowledgeSpaces. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical
                                Society. Dr. Leidner’s experience includes positions as Director of Research at Thomson Reuters
                                and Refinitiv in London, where he headed its R&D team (2013-2022). He has built up research
                                and innovation teams. He was also the Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of
                                Data Analytics at the Department of Computer Science. His background includes a Master’s in
                                computational linguistics, English and computer science (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), a
                                Master’s in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (University of Cambridge) and
                                a PhD in Informatics (University of Edinburgh), which won the first ACM SIGIR Doctoral
                                Consortium Award. He is a scientific expert for the European Commission (FP7, H2020, Horizon
                                Europe) and other funding bodies in Germany, Austria, the UK and the USA. He also is a past

                                In: R. Campos, A. Jorge, A. Jatowt, S. Bhatia, M. Litvak (eds.): Proceedings of the Text2Story’24 Workshop, Glasgow
                                (United Kingdom), 24-March-2024.
                                � Jochen.Leidner@hs-coburg.de (J. L. Leidner)
                                � https:
                                //www.coburg-university.de/about-us/faculties/faculty-of-business-and-economics/prof-jochen-l-leidner.html
                                (J. L. Leidner)
                                         © 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).




CEUR
                  ceur-ws.org
Workshop      ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings

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chair of the Microsoft-BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Sparck Jones award. Professor Leidner is an author
or co-author of several dozen peer-reviewed publications (including one best paper award), has
authored or co-edited two books and holds several patents in the areas of information retrieval,
natural language processing, and mobile computing. He has been twice winner of the Thomson
Reuters inventor of the year award for the best patent application, and is the past received of a
Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship in Electronic Markets.




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