To understand a narrative, it is essential to comprehend its main characters and the associated major events; however, this can be challenging with lengthy and unstructured narrative texts. To address this, we introduce NECE, an open-access, document-level toolkit that automatically extracts and aligns narrative events in the temporal order of their occurrence using sliding window method. Through extensive human evaluations, we have confirmed the high quality of the NECE toolkit, and external validation has demonstrated its potential for application in downstream tasks such as question answering and bias analysis. The NECE toolkit includes both a Python library and a user-friendly web interface; the latter offers custom visualizations of event chains and easy navigation between graphics and text to improve reading efficiency and experience.

翻译：为理解叙事内容，必须把握其核心角色及相关重大事件；然而，面对篇幅冗长且非结构化的叙事文本，这一任务颇具挑战性。为此，我们提出NECE——一个开放的文档级工具包，采用滑动窗口方法自动提取叙事事件，并按时间顺序对齐。通过广泛的人工评估，我们证实了NECE工具包的高质量，外部验证也表明其在问答和偏见分析等下游任务中的潜在应用价值。该工具包包含Python库和用户友好的Web界面，后者可生成自定义的事件链可视化图表，并支持图文间的便捷导航，以提升阅读效率与体验。