Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales

Saba Shahsavari; Alessa Mayer; Fabian Suchanek

Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales

Saba Shahsavari, Alessa Mayer, Fabian M. Suchanek

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Abstract

A motif is a pattern that appears across stories, tales, or legends, such as “a prince falls in love with commoner”. We propose a method based on large language models to extract such motifs automatically from stories. Our approach addresses challenges such as motif synonymy, and achieves high alignment with expert-annotated ground truth. We illustrate the utility of our extraction in downstream applications such as mitigating gender bias in existing motif collections, studying narrative event sequences, quantifying cross-regional story similarity, validating the correlation between linguistically related cultures, and tracing the relatedness of religious traditions.

Anthology ID:: 2026.oracle-main.16
Volume:: The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE)
Month:: October
Year:: 2026
Address:: Budapest, Hungary
Editors:: Leonardo Ranaldi, Giulia Pucci, Federico Ranaldi, Marco Valentino, Alexandra Birch, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto
Venues:: ORACLE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:: Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:: 246–256
Language:
URL:: https://aclanthology.org/2026.oracle-main.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):: Saba Shahsavari, Alessa Mayer, and Fabian M. Suchanek. 2026. Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales. In The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE), pages 246–256, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):: Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales (Shahsavari et al., ORACLE 2026)
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PDF:: https://aclanthology.org/2026.oracle-main.16.pdf

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@inproceedings{shahsavari-etal-2026-mining,
    title = "Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales",
    author = "Shahsavari, Saba  and
      Mayer, Alessa  and
      Suchanek, Fabian M.",
    editor = "Ranaldi, Leonardo  and
      Pucci, Giulia  and
      Ranaldi, Federico  and
      Valentino, Marco  and
      Birch, Alexandra  and
      Zanzotto, Fabio Massimo",
    booktitle = "The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages ({ORACLE})",
    month = oct,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Budapest, Hungary",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.oracle-main.16/",
    pages = "246--256",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-483-5",
    abstract = "A motif is a pattern that appears across stories, tales, or legends, such as ``a prince falls in love with commoner''. We propose a method based on large language models to extract such motifs automatically from stories. Our approach addresses challenges such as motif synonymy, and achieves high alignment with expert-annotated ground truth. We illustrate the utility of our extraction in downstream applications such as mitigating gender bias in existing motif collections, studying narrative event sequences, quantifying cross-regional story similarity, validating the correlation between linguistically related cultures, and tracing the relatedness of religious traditions."
}

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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales
%A Shahsavari, Saba
%A Mayer, Alessa
%A Suchanek, Fabian M.
%Y Ranaldi, Leonardo
%Y Pucci, Giulia
%Y Ranaldi, Federico
%Y Valentino, Marco
%Y Birch, Alexandra
%Y Zanzotto, Fabio Massimo
%S The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-483-5
%F shahsavari-etal-2026-mining
%X A motif is a pattern that appears across stories, tales, or legends, such as “a prince falls in love with commoner”. We propose a method based on large language models to extract such motifs automatically from stories. Our approach addresses challenges such as motif synonymy, and achieves high alignment with expert-annotated ground truth. We illustrate the utility of our extraction in downstream applications such as mitigating gender bias in existing motif collections, studying narrative event sequences, quantifying cross-regional story similarity, validating the correlation between linguistically related cultures, and tracing the relatedness of religious traditions.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.oracle-main.16/
%P 246-256

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Markdown (Informal)

[Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales](https://aclanthology.org/2026.oracle-main.16/) (Shahsavari et al., ORACLE 2026)

Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales (Shahsavari et al., ORACLE 2026)

ACL

Saba Shahsavari, Alessa Mayer, and Fabian M. Suchanek. 2026. Mining Motifs in Fairy Tales. In The Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Reasoning Across Cultures Languages (ORACLE), pages 246–256, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.