Modelling Narrative Elements in a Short Story: A Study on Annotation Schemes and Guidelines

Elena Mikhalkova, Timofei Protasov, Polina Sokolova, Anastasiia Bashmakova, Anastasiia Drozdova


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.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
126–132
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Mikhalkova, Timofei Protasov, Polina Sokolova, Anastasiia Bashmakova, and Anastasiia Drozdova. 2020. Modelling Narrative Elements in a Short Story: A Study on Annotation Schemes and Guidelines. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 126–132, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Modelling Narrative Elements in a Short Story: A Study on Annotation Schemes and Guidelines (Mikhalkova et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.16.pdf