A method that transfers temporal-reasoning ability into a timeline-summarisation model through knowledge distillation: a teacher language model is fine-tuned on temporal-relation tasks and its knowledge is distilled into a student model trained simultaneously to summarise chronological event sequences. It is introduced alongside NarrativeReason, a dataset of temporal relations among whole sequences of events within narratives rather than isolated event pairs, and improves summarisation of long social-media threads where events lack explicit timestamps.
Timeline summarisation condenses a long text containing a sequence of events, such as a social media thread, into a concise summary that preserves the chronological order of those events. This paper …