PersonaBank: A Corpus of Personal Narratives and Their Story Intention Graphs

PersonaBank: A Corpus of Personal Narratives and Their Story Intention Graphs Stephanie M. Lukin, Kevin Bowden, Casey Barackman, and Marilyn A. Walker University of California Santa Cruz Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab Computer Science Department slukin@ucsc.edu, mawalker@ucsc.edu Abstract We present a new corpus, PersonaBank, consisting of 108 personal stories from weblogs that have been annotated with their STORY INTENTION GRAPHS, a deep representation of the fabula of a story. We describe the topics of the stories and the basis of the STORY INTENTION GRAPH representation, as well as the process of annotating the stories to produce the STORY INTENTION GRAPHs and the challenges of adapting the tool to this new personal narrative domain We also discuss how the corpus can be used in applications that retell the story using different styles of tellings, co-tellings, or as a content planner. Keywords: Personal Narratives, Discourse and Narrative Representations, Computational Storytelling, Natural Language Gener- ation 1. Introduction Hundreds of thousands of personal narratives are published on the web each month in weblogs. These personal nar- ratives provide direct insight into the daily lives of peo- ple, the activities they engage in and their beliefs, goals and plans. We have developed a new corpus, Persona- Bank, that consists of 108 personal narratives annotated with a deep representation of narrative called a STORY IN- TENTION GRAPH or SIG. The story topics include stories about romance, travel, sports, holidays, watching wildlife, and weather. The stories have also been annotated for over- all positive and negative tone. The SIG representation pro- vides a propositional representation of the story timeline, the goals and motivations of the story characters, and the affective impacts of story events on characters. Our approach builds on the corpus and tools associated with the DramaBank language resource, a collection of Aesop’s Fables and other classic stories that utilize the SIG repre- sentation (Elson and McKeown, 2010; Elson, 2012a; El- son, 2010). This work is the first to apply this formalism to informal personal narratives, such as the story about The Startled Squirrel shown in Figure 1. This is one of those times I wish I had a digital camera. We keep a large stainless steel bowl of water outside on the back deck for Benjamin to drink out of when he’s playing outside. His bowl has become a very popular site. Throughout the day, many birds drink out of it and bathe in it. The birds literally line up on the railing and wait their turn. Squirrels also come to drink out of it. The craziest squirrel just came by- he was literally jumping in fright at what I believe was his own reflection in the bowl. He was startled so much at one point that he leap in the air and fell off the deck. But not quite, I saw his one little paw hanging on! After a moment or two his paw slipped and he tumbled down a few feet. But oh, if you could have seen the look on his …

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