InScript: Narrative texts annotated with script information

InScript: Narrative texts annotated with script information Ashutosh Modi, Tatjana Anikina, Simon Ostermann, Manfred Pinkal Universit¨at des Saarlandes Saarland, 66123, Germany {ashutosh, tatianak, simono, pinkal}@coli.uni-saarland.de Abstract This paper presents the InScript corpus (Narrative Texts Instantiating Script structure). InScript is a corpus of 1,000 stories centered around 10 different scenarios. Verbs and noun phrases are annotated with event and participant types, respectively. Additionally, the text is annotated with coreference information. The corpus shows rich lexical variation and will serve as a unique resource for the study of the role of script knowledge in natural language processing. Keywords: scripts, narrative texts, script knowledge, common sense knowledge 1. Motivation A script is “a standardized sequence of events that describes some stereotypical human activity such as going to a restau- rant or visiting a doctor” (Barr and Feigenbaum, 1981). Script events describe an action/activity along with the in- volved participants. For example, in the script describing A VISIT TO A RESTAURANT, typical events are ENTERING THE RESTAURANT, ORDERING FOOD or EATING. Partici- pants in this scenario can include animate objects like the WAITER and the CUSTOMER, as well as inanimate objects such as CUTLERY or FOOD. Script knowledge has been shown to play an important role in text understanding (Cullingford, 1978; Miikkulainen, 1995; Mueller, 2004; Chambers and Jurafsky, 2008; Cham- bers and Jurafsky, 2009; Modi and Titov, 2014; Rudinger et al., 2015). It guides the expectation of the reader, supports coreference resolution as well as common-sense knowl- edge inference and enables the appropriate embedding of the current sentence into the larger context. Figure 1 shows the first few sentences of a story describing the scenario TAKING A BATH. Once the TAKING A BATH scenario is evoked by the noun phrase (NP) “a bath”, the reader can effortlessly interpret the definite NP “the faucet” as an im- plicitly present standard participant of the TAKING A BATH script. Although in this story, “entering the bath room”, “turning on the water” and “filling the tub” are explicitly mentioned, a reader could nevertheless have inferred the “turning on the water” event, even if it was not explicitly mentioned in the text. Table 1 gives an example of typical events and participants for the script describing the scenario TAKING A BATH. A systematic study of the influence of script knowledge in texts is far from trivial. Typically, text documents (e.g. nar- rative texts) describing various scenarios evoke many dif- ferent scripts, making it difficult to study the effect of a single script. Efforts have been made to collect scenario- specific script knowledge via crowdsourcing, for example the OMICS and SMILE corpora (Singh et al., 2002; Reg- neri et al., 2010; Regneri, 2013), but these corpora describe script events in a pointwise telegram style rather than in full texts. I was sitting on my couch when I decided that I hadn’t taken a bath in a while so I stood up and walked to the bathroom where I turned on the faucet in the sink and began filling the bath …

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