Annotating High-Level Structures of Short Stories and Personal Anecdotes

Annotating High-Level Structures of Short Stories and Personal Anecdotes Boyang Li1, Beth Cardier2, Tong Wang3, and Florian Metze4 1 Independent 2 Sirius-Beta, Virginia Beach, VA 3 University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA 4 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA boyangli@outlook.com, bethcardier@sirius-beta.com, tong.wang001@umb.edu, fmetze@cs.cmu.edu Abstract Stories are a vital form of communication in human culture; they are employed daily to persuade, to elicit sympathy, or to convey a message. Computational understanding of human narratives, especially high-level narrative structures, remain limited to date. Multiple literary theories for narrative structures exist, but operationalization of the theories has remained a challenge. We developed an annotation scheme by consolidating and extending existing narratological theories, including Labov and Waletsky’s (1967) functional categorization scheme and Freytag’s (1863) pyramid of dramatic tension, and present 360 annotated short stories collected from online sources. In the future, this research will support an approach that enables systems to intelligently sustain complex communications with humans. Keywords: narrative structure, dramatic arc, story understanding 1. Introduction Story is a fundamental form of human communication, sometimes argued to be more powerful than logical arguments (Bruner 1986; Fisher 1987). Stories can be used, for example, to persuade, to encourage, to elicit sympathy, and convey a moral, message, value or lesson. It follows that a computational understanding of stories will help computer systems communicate better with users. Recent years have witnessed growing interests in computational approaches for story understanding (Bamman et al. 2013; Ferraro and Van Durme 2016; Finlayson, M. A. 2016; Goyal et al. 2010; Ouyang and McKeown 2015; Huang et al. 2016; Pichotta and Mooney 2016; Tapaswi et al. 2016; Mostafazadeh et al. 2016; Chaturvedi et al. 2017; Wang et al. 2017; Dogan et al. 2018). Yet few attempts to understand high-level story structures, which are the focus of the present paper. What constitutes story structure or a “story arc” may be debatable since there is more than one facet to a story. As an operating definition, we consider story structure to satisfy the following requirements: (1) it contains a small set of functions with typical orderings between them, though atypical orderings are sometimes possible. (2) The functions are independent of content and genre; they describe structures of stories with different content in any genre. (3) The functions carry significance on the dramatic arc, and (4) together they describe most of a story rather than a small part of it. This definition rules out the functions proposed by Propp (1928) for Russian folklores, components of the hero’s journey (Campbell 1949), and other similar theories because they are closely tied to one type or genre of stories and are not domain-independent. Event-level represent- tations, such as plot units (Lehnert 1981), also do not fit the definition because not all events play important dramatic roles and the ordering between events can be rather arbitrary. Instead, we investigate what was described by Aristotle (circa. 335 BC) as the beginning, the middle and the end of a story. Similar to Aristotle, Freytag (1863) proposed a dramatic structure containing five parts, …

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