Complex news events, such as natural disasters and socio-political conflicts, require swift responses from the government and society. Relying on historical events to project the future is insufficient as such events are sparse and do not cover all possible conditions and nuanced situations. Simulation of these complex events can help better prepare and reduce the negative impact. We develop a controllable complex news event simulator guided by both the event schema representing domain knowledge about the scenario and user-provided assumptions representing case-specific conditions. As event dynamics depend on the fine-grained social and cultural context, we further introduce a geo-diverse commonsense and cultural norm-aware knowledge enhancement component. To enhance the coherence of the simulation, apart from the global timeline of events, we take an agent-based approach to simulate the individual character states, plans, and actions. By incorporating the schema and cultural norms, our generated simulations achieve much higher coherence and appropriateness and are received favorably by participants from a humanitarian assistance organization.

翻译：复杂新闻事件（如自然灾害和社会政治冲突）需要政府和社会迅速作出反应。依赖历史事件预测未来存在不足，因为此类事件稀疏且无法涵盖所有可能条件与细微情境。对这些复杂事件进行仿真有助于更好地准备并减少负面影响。我们开发了一种可控的复杂新闻事件模拟器，其引导机制既包含表征场景领域知识的事件模式，也包含用户提供的表征特定案例条件的假设。由于事件动态依赖于细粒度的社会文化背景，我们进一步引入了地理多样性常识与文化规范感知的知识增强组件。为提升仿真连贯性，除全局事件时间线外，我们采用基于智能体的方法模拟个体角色状态、计划与行为。通过融入事件模式与文化规范，我们生成的仿真在连贯性与合理性上显著提升，并获得了人道主义援助组织参与者的积极评价。