Alector: A Parallel Corpus of Simplified French Texts with Alignments of Misreadings by Poor and Dyslexic Readers

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 126–132 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 126 Modelling Narrative Elements in a Short Story: A Study on Annotation Schemes and Guidelines Elena Mikhalkova, Timofei Protasov, Polina Gavin, Anastasiia Bashmakova, Anastasiia Drozdova Tyumen State University 625003 Volodarskogo Street, 6 Tyumen, Russia {e.v.mikhalkova, t.a.protasov}@utmn.ru Abstract Text-processing algorithms that annotate main components of a story-line are presently in great need of corpora and well-agreed annotation schemes. The Text World Theory of cognitive linguistics offers a model that generalizes a narrative structure in the form of world-building elements (characters, time and space) as well as text worlds themselves and switches between them. We have conducted a survey on how text worlds and their elements are annotated in different projects and proposed our own annotation scheme and instructions. We tested them, first, on the science fiction story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick. Then we corrected the guidelines and added computer annotation of verb forms with the purpose to get a higher raters’ agreement and tested them again on the short story “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry. As a result, the agreement among the three raters has risen. With due revision and tests, our annotation scheme and guidelines can be used for annotating narratives in corpora of literary texts, criminal evidence, teaching materials, quests, etc. Keywords: cognitive linguistics, natural language processing, literature, text annotation, corpus, Text World Theory 1. Introduction Text-processing algorithms that annotate main components of a story as a human reader would do, are presently in great need of corpora and well-agreed annotation schemes. Al- though the task of processing story-lines is yet at an early stage of research, it is studied from fundamental and prac- tical sides in the following areas: 1. cognitive linguistics, to model readers’ (Gavins, 2000; Whiteley, 2010; Whiteley, 2011; Giovanelli, 2011) and movie-watchers’ (Lugea, 2013) cognition of sto- ries and narratives; 2. forensics, to present and compare crime evidence (Wang et al., 2016; Somaraki and Xu, 2016; Ho et al., 2018a; Ho et al., 2018b); 3. philology, to analyze the structure of literary works (Gavins, 2000; Whiteley, 2010; Whiteley, 2011), po- etry (Giovanelli, 2011) and movies (Lugea, 2013), po- litical speeches (Gavins, 2007; Browse, 2018) and ad- vertisement (Downing, 2003) as well as legal texts (Wang et al., 2016; Ho et al., 2018a; Ho et al., 2018b) and fan studies; 4. teaching (Giovanelli et al., 2015; Giovanelli and Ma- son, 2015; Cushing, 2018), to present language mate- rial (e.g. grammar) in a clearer and more understand- able way; 5. humour analysis (Downing, 2000); 6. computational linguistics (Elson, 2012). One of the current theories used in computational linguis- tics to model readers’ perception of a text is the Text World Theory (TWT) suggested in the cognitive linguis- tics (Werth, 1999). This field focuses on mental mecha- nisms that people employ in their mind when processing or constructing an event. These …

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