This paper proposes a sentiment-centric pipeline to perform unsupervised plot extraction on non-linear novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a novel widely considered to be “plotless. Combining transformer-based sentiment analysis models with statistical testing, we model sentiment’s rate-of-change and correspondingly segment the novel into emotionally self-contained units qualitatively evaluated to be meaningful surrogate pseudo-chapters. We validate our findings by evaluating our pipeline as a fully unsupervised text segmentation model, achieving a F-1 score of 0.643 (regional) and 0.214 (exact) in chapter break prediction on a validation set of linear novels with existing chapter structures. In addition, we observe notable differences between the distributions of predicted chapter lengths in linear and non-linear fictional narratives, with the latter exhibiting significantly greater variability. Our results hold significance for narrative researchers appraising methods for extracting plots from non-linear novels.

Aphasia and dysarthria are both common symptoms of stroke, affecting around 30% and 50% of acute ischemic stroke patients. In this paper, we propose a storyline-centric approach to detect aphasia and dysarthria in acute stroke patients using transcribed picture descriptions alone. Our pipeline enriches the training set with healthy data to address the lack of acute stroke patient data and utilizes knowledge distillation to significantly improve upon a document classification baseline, achieving an AUC of 0.814 (aphasia) and 0.764 (dysarthria) on a patient-only validation set.