Story Morals: Surfacing value-driven narrative schemas using large language models

David Hobson, Haiqi Zhou, Derek Ruths, Andrew Piper


Abstract
Stories are not only designed to entertain but encode lessons reflecting their authors’ beliefs about the world. In this paper, we propose a new task of narrative schema labelling based on the concept of “story morals” to identify the values and lessons conveyed in stories. Using large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, we develop methods to automatically extract and validate story morals across a diverse set of narrative genres, including folktales, novels, movies and TV, personal stories from social media and the news. Our approach involves a multi-step prompting sequence to derive morals and validate them through both automated metrics and human assessments. The findings suggest that LLMs can effectively approximate human story moral interpretations and offer a new avenue for computational narrative understanding. By clustering the extracted morals on a sample dataset of folktales from around the world, we highlight the commonalities and distinctiveness of narrative values, providing preliminary insights into the distribution of values across cultures. This work opens up new possibilities for studying narrative schemas and their role in shaping human beliefs and behaviors.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.723
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12998–13032
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.723
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Hobson, Haiqi Zhou, Derek Ruths, and Andrew Piper. 2024. Story Morals: Surfacing value-driven narrative schemas using large language models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12998–13032, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Story Morals: Surfacing value-driven narrative schemas using large language models (Hobson et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.723.pdf