Inferring Narrative Causality between Event Pairs in Films

Zhichao Hu, Marilyn Walker


Abstract
To understand narrative, humans draw inferences about the underlying relations between narrative events. Cognitive theories of narrative understanding define these inferences as four different types of causality, that include pairs of events A, B where A physically causes B (X drop, X break), to pairs of events where A causes emotional state B (Y saw X, Y felt fear). Previous work on learning narrative relations from text has either focused on “strict” physical causality, or has been vague about what relation is being learned. This paper learns pairs of causal events from a corpus of film scene descriptions which are action rich and tend to be told in chronological order. We show that event pairs induced using our methods are of high quality and are judged to have a stronger causal relation than event pairs from Rel-Grams.
Anthology ID:
W17-5540
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Saarbrücken, Germany
Editors:
Kristiina Jokinen, Manfred Stede, David DeVault, Annie Louis
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
342–351
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5540
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-5540
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhichao Hu and Marilyn Walker. 2017. Inferring Narrative Causality between Event Pairs in Films. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 342–351, Saarbrücken, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inferring Narrative Causality between Event Pairs in Films (Hu & Walker, SIGDIAL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5540.pdf
Poster:
 W17-5540.Poster.pdf