Event-Centric Human Value Understanding in News-Domain Texts: An Actor-Conditioned, Multi-Granularity Benchmark
Yao Wang, Xin Liu, Zhuochen Liu, Jiankang Chen, Adam Jatowt, Kyoungsook Kim, Noriko Kando, Haitao Yu
Abstract
Existing human value datasets do not directly support value understanding in factual news: many are actor-agnostic, rely on isolated utterances or synthetic scenarios, and lack explicit event structure or value direction. We present \textbf{NEVU} (\textbf{N}ews \textbf{E}vent-centric \textbf{V}alue \textbf{U}nderstanding), a benchmark for \emph{actor-conditioned}, \emph{event-centric}, and \emph{direction-aware} human value recognition in factual news. NEVU evaluates whether models can identify value cues, attribute them to the correct actor, and determine value direction from grounded evidence. Built from 2{,}865 English news articles, NEVU organizes annotations at four semantic unit levels (\textbf{Subevent}, \textbf{behavior-based composite event}, \textbf{story-based composite event}, and \textbf{Article}) and labels \mbox{(unit, actor)} pairs for fine-grained evaluation across local and composite contexts. The annotations are produced through an LLM-assisted pipeline with staged verification and targeted human auditing. Using a hierarchical value space with \textbf{54} fine-grained values and \textbf{20} coarse-grained categories, NEVU covers 45{,}793 unit--actor pairs and 168{,}061 directed value instances. We provide unified baselines for proprietary and open-source LLMs, and find that lightweight adaptation (LoRA) consistently improves open-source models, showing that although NEVU is designed primarily as a benchmark, it also supports supervised adaptation beyond prompting-only evaluation. Data availability is described in Appendix~\ref{app:data_code_availability}.