Annotating Mystery Novels: Guidelines and Adaptations

Nuette Heyns, Menno Van Zaanen


Abstract
To understand how stories are structured, we would like to be able to analyze the architecture of narratives. This article reviews and compares existing annotation guidelines for scene and narrative level annotation. We propose new guidelines, based on existing ones, and show how these can be effectively extended from general-purpose to specialized contexts, such as mystery novels which feature unique narrative elements like red herrings and plot twists. This provides a controlled environment for examining genre-specific event structuring. Additionally, we present a newly annotated genre-specific dataset of mystery novels, offering valuable resources for training and evaluating models in narrative understanding. This study aims to enhance annotation practices and advance the development of computational models for narrative analysis.
Anthology ID:
2024.wnu-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yash Kumar Lal, Elizabeth Clark, Mohit Iyyer, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Anneliese Brei, Faeze Brahman, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu
Venue:
WNU
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
55–66
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wnu-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nuette Heyns and Menno Van Zaanen. 2024. Annotating Mystery Novels: Guidelines and Adaptations. In Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding, pages 55–66, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Annotating Mystery Novels: Guidelines and Adaptations (Heyns & Van Zaanen, WNU 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wnu-1.9.pdf