| Challenge: | Understanding a narrative requires reasoning about the causal links between the events in the story and the mental states of the characters, even when those relationships are not explicitly stated. |
| Approach: | They propose a new annotation framework to explain naive psychology of story characters as fully-specified chains of mental states with respect to motivations and emotional reactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a baseline performance on several new tasks suggesting avenues for future research. |
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Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict characters' personalities have not been studied in the NLP field due to the lack of appropriate datasets mimicking the process of book reading. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to predict characters' personalities that uses an exhaustive vocabulary of personality traits as targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is efficient and accurate and relies on long-term context to achieve accurate predictions for both machines and humans. |
Annotating High-Level Structures of Short Stories and Personal Anecdotes (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing theories for narrative structures have been challenging to operationalize . authors present an annotation scheme to help computer systems understand stories better . |
| Approach: | They propose to consolidate and extend existing narratological theories and an annotation scheme . they will support an approach that enables systems to intelligently sustain complex communications with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consolidates and extends existing narratological theories . it will support an approach that enables systems to intelligently sustain complex communications with humans . |
Modeling Human Mental States with an Entity-based Narrative Graph (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Understanding narrative text requires capturing characters’ motivations, goals, and mental states. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity-based Narrative Graph (ENG) to model the internal-states of characters in a story and evaluate it on two narrative understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two narrative understanding tasks: predicting character mental states, and desire fulfillment. |
A Straightforward Approach to Narratologically Grounded Character Identification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing definitions of character are based on simplified or implicit definitions that do not capture essential distinctions between characters and other referents in narratives. |
| Approach: | They propose a narratologically grounded definition of character that is based on clear narrological principles and annotated 170 narrative texts. |
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Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models learn harmful biases from their training corpora and may repeat these biase if used for generation. |
| Approach: | They focus on gender biases associated with the protagonist in model-generated stories and use a commonsense reasoning engine to uncover them. |
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Event2Mind: Commonsense Inference on Events, Intents, and Reactions (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a crowdsourced corpus of 25,000 event phrases, we construct a new task that uses commonsense reasoning to reason about the likely intents and reactions of the event participants. |
| Approach: | They construct a crowdsourced corpus of 25,000 event phrases and use them to construct 'commonsense inference' they demonstrate that neural encoder-decoder models can compose embedding representations of previously unseen events and reason about the likely intents and reactions of the event participants. |
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“Let Your Characters Tell Their Story”: A Dataset for Character-Centric Narrative Understanding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on character-centric understanding of narratives focus on understanding the characters in the narrative, but these studies are limited to understanding only certain aspects of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of literary pieces and their summaries paired with descriptions of characters that appear in them that are used to facilitate character-centric narrative understanding. |
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Frowning Frodo, Wincing Leia, and a Seriously Great Friendship: Learning to Classify Emotional Relationships of Fictional Characters (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature analysis does not focus on roles of characters or on relationships between them. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine emotion and character identification into a unified framework for character network extraction from fictional texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on fan-fiction short stories and is able to predict emotion relations in the extracted network graph. |
GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations (2020.emnlp-main)
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Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Aditya Kalyanpur, Lori Moon, David Buchanan, Lauren Berkowitz, Or Biran, Jennifer Chu-Carroll
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge resources and pretrained language models do not include or readily predict GLUCOSE’s rich inferential content. |
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| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained on human-readable stories and build similar models on unseen stories. |
An Emotional Mess! Deciding on a Framework for Building a Dutch Emotion-Annotated Corpus (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for emotion recognition are limited and do not allow for categorical versus dimensional oppositions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the emotions joy, love, anger, sadness and fear as well as dimensional models to annotate texts from different domains and topics. |
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