Using narrative functions as a heuristic for relevance in story understanding

  • Authors:
  • Emmett Tomai;Ken Forbus

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Texas - Pan American, Edinburg, TX;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Intelligent Narrative Technologies III Workshop
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Story understanding requires a degree of knowledge and expressiveness beyond the current state of natural language understanding. We present an approach that addresses these needs, using a large-scale knowledge base, simplified English grammar and a combination of compositional frame semantics and abductive reasoning. This in turn raises a significant challenge disambiguating complex semantic structures, which requires a pragmatics of narrative for constraint and guidance. We present a theory of narrative functions that serve as a heuristic for relevance in narrative, and provide evidence that this heuristic is effective for disambiguation that leads to consistent understanding.