Modeling Narrative Discourse

Modeling Narrative Discourse David K. Elson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2012

c 2012 David K. Elson All Rights Reserved

ABSTRACT

Modeling Narrative Discourse

David K. Elson

This thesis describes new approaches to the formal modeling of narrative discourse. Although narratives of all kinds are ubiquitous in daily life, contemporary text processing techniques typically do not leverage the aspects that separate narrative from expository discourse. We describe two approaches to the problem. The first approach considers the conversational networks to be found in literary fiction as a key aspect of discourse coherence; by isolating and analyzing these networks, we are able to comment on longstanding literary theories. The second approach proposes a new set of discourse relations that are specific to narrative. By focusing on certain key aspects, such as agentive characters, goals, plans, beliefs, and time, these relations represent a theory-of-mind interpretation of a text. We show that these discourse relations are expressive, formal, robust, and through the use of a software system, amenable to corpus collection projects through the use of trained annotators. We have procured and released a collection of over 100 encodings, covering a set of fables as well as longer texts including literary fiction and epic poetry. We are able to inferentially find similarities and analogies between encoded stories based on the proposed relations, and an evaluation of this technique shows that human raters prefer such a measure of similarity to a more traditional one based on the semantic distances between story propositions.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

1

2 Literary Social Networks

10

2.1 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2.2 Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

2.3 Overview of Corpora and Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

2.4 Character Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

2.5 Quoted Speech Attribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

2.5.1 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

2.5.2 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

2.5.3 Encoding, cleaning, and normalizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

2.5.4 Dialogue chains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

2.5.5 Syntactic categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

2.5.6 Feature extraction and learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

2.5.7 Results and discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

2.6 Conversational Network Construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

2.7 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

2.7.1 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

2.7.2 Literary Interpretation of Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

2.8 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

3 Story Intention Graphs

43

3.1 Goals For A New Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

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3.2 A Brief History of Narrative Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 3.2.1 Foundations in Cognitive Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 3.2.2 Discourse and Literary Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 3.2.3 Implemented Understanding: Scripts, Plans and Plot Units . . . . . 70 3.2.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

3.3 Story Intention Graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 3.3.1 Textual and Timeline Layers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 3.3.2 Interpretative Layer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 3.3.3 Summary and Comparison to Prior Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

3.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

4 Scheherazade

128

4.1 Data Structure and Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

4.2 Semantic Network Engine and Story Logic Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

4.3 Graphical Annotation Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

4.3.1 Related work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

4.3.2 Overview of annotation procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

4.3.3 Object and theme extraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

4.3.4 Propositional modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

4.3.5 Interpretative panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

4.3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

4.4 Text Generation: Assigning Tense and Aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

4.4.1 Basic Planner and Realizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

4.4.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

4.4.3 Temporal knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

4.4.4 Expressing single events from a reference state . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

4.4.5 Expressing single events from a reference interval . . . . . . . . . . . 179

4.4.6 Expressing multiple events in alternate timelines . . . . . . . . . . . 181

4.4.7 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

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