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Using narrative functions as a heuristic for relevance in story understanding

Published: 18 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Story understanding requires a degree of knowledge and expressiveness beyond the current state of natural language understanding. We present an approach that addresses these needs, using a large-scale knowledge base, simplified English grammar and a combination of compositional frame semantics and abductive reasoning. This in turn raises a significant challenge disambiguating complex semantic structures, which requires a pragmatics of narrative for constraint and guidance. We present a theory of narrative functions that serve as a heuristic for relevance in narrative, and provide evidence that this heuristic is effective for disambiguation that leads to consistent understanding.

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Cited By

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  • (2013)Automatic dominant character identification in fables based on verb analysis - Empirical study on the impact of anaphora resolutionKnowledge-Based Systems10.5555/2770961.277110954:C(147-162)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2013
  • (2013)Automatic dominant character identification in fables based on verb analysis – Empirical study on the impact of anaphora resolutionKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2013.09.00954(147-162)Online publication date: Dec-2013

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      INT3 '10: Proceedings of the Intelligent Narrative Technologies III Workshop
      June 2010
      128 pages
      ISBN:9781450300223
      DOI:10.1145/1822309
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 18 June 2010

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      Author Tags

      1. abductive reasoning
      2. knowledge representation
      3. narrative
      4. natural language understanding
      5. semantics
      6. story

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      View all
      • (2013)Automatic dominant character identification in fables based on verb analysis - Empirical study on the impact of anaphora resolutionKnowledge-Based Systems10.5555/2770961.277110954:C(147-162)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2013
      • (2013)Automatic dominant character identification in fables based on verb analysis – Empirical study on the impact of anaphora resolutionKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2013.09.00954(147-162)Online publication date: Dec-2013

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