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Vrittanta-EN: A Benchmark Dataset for Event Trigger Detection and Classification Advancing Event Understanding in English Narrative Discourse

Event trigger detection and classification involve identifying meaningful occurrences and categorizing them into predefined event types within narrative text. Despite extensive research on English event extraction in factual domains like news and biomedical text, narrative prose, such as short stories, has received comparatively little attention. To bridge this gap, Vrittanta-EN introduces a manually annotated English corpus comprising 11,272 event instances extracted from diverse short stories. The dataset captures a wide range of communicative, cognitive, and physical actions typical of narrative discourse. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across a wide range of models, including classical machine learning baselines (SVM, Naive Bayes), neural sequential models (LSTM, BiLSTM, BiLSTM-CRF), encoder-only transformers (BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, DistilBERT, DeBERTa, ELECTRA), and encoder-decoder models (T5, BART), along with large language models (GPT-4.1, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, Claude Sonnet 4) under both zero-shot and five-shot settings. Experimental results show that ELECTRA achieved the highest overall performance for event trigger detection with an F1-score of 90.61%, while RoBERTa demonstrated superior performance for event classification with a macro F1 of 74.71%. These findings highlight the robustness of contextual transformer-based architectures for modeling narrative event structures in English short stories. The dataset, code, and annotation guidelines will be publicly released upon paper acceptance.