Advances in Human Event Modeling: From Graph Neural Networks to Language Models

Human events such as hospital visits, protests, and epidemic outbreaks directly affect individuals, communities, and societies. These events are often influenced by factors such as economics, politics, and public policies of our society. The abundance of online data sources such as social networks, official news articles, and personal blogs chronicle societal events, facilitating the development of AI models for social science, public health care, and decision making. Human event modeling generally comprises both the forecasting stage, which estimates future events based on historical data, and interpretation, which seeks to identify influential factors of such events to understand their causative attributes. Recent achievements, fueled by deep learning and the availability of public data, have significantly advanced the field of human event modeling.