Modeling Reportable Events as Turning Points in Narrative

Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2149–2158, Lisbon, Portugal, 17-21 September 2015. c⃝2015 Association for Computational Linguistics. Modeling Reportable Events as Turning Points in Narrative Jessica Ouyang Department of Computer Science Columbia University New York, NY 10027 ouyangj@cs.columbia.edu Kathleen McKeown Department of Computer Science Columbia University New York, NY 10027 kathy@cs.columbia.edu Abstract We present novel experiments in model- ing the rise and fall of story characteristics within narrative, leading up to the Most Reportable Event (MRE), the compelling event that is the nucleus of the story. We construct a corpus of personal narratives from the bulletin board website Reddit, using the organization of Reddit content into topic-specific communities to auto- matically identify narratives. Leveraging the structure of Reddit comment threads, we automatically label a large dataset of narratives. We present a change-based model of narrative that tracks changes in formality, affect, and other characteristics over the course of a story, and we use this model in distant supervision and self- training experiments that achieve signifi- cant improvements over the baselines at the task of identifying MREs. 1 Introduction What is a narrative? In one of the early linguis- tic analyses of storytelling, Prince (1973) defines a story as describing an event that causes a change of state. Prince’s minimal story has three parts: the starting state, the ending state, and the event that transforms the stating state into the ending state. An example of a minimal story is as follows: A man was unhappy, then he fell in love, then as a result, he was happy. Polanyi (1976) notes that minimal stories are toy examples that would never hold an audience’s interest. So what makes a story interesting? Labov (1967; 1997) defines a well-formed nar- rative as a series of actions leading to a Most Re- portable Event (MRE). The MRE is the point of the story – the most unusual event that has the greatest emotional impact on the narrator and the audience. For a story to be interesting, Prince’s change-of-state event should be an MRE. The following is an example of a narrative from the corpus we create in this work, with the sen- tence containing the MRE emphasized: This isn’t exactly creepy, but it’s one of the scariest things that’s ever happened to me. I was driving down the motor- way with my boyfriend in the passenger seat, and my dad in the seat behind my own. My dad is an epileptic and his fits are extremely sporadic. Sometimes he goes extremely stiff and other times he will try to get out of places or grab and punch people. Mid-conversation I felt his hands wrap around my throat as I was driving, pulling my head back and making it increasingly difficult to drive. My boyfriend managed to help steer the car into the hard shoulder but it was one of the scariest experiences in my life. The MRE is the shortest possible summary of a story; it is what we …

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