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Recognizing Coherent Narrative Blog Content

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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10045))

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Abstract

Interactive storytelling applications have at their disposal massive numbers of human-authored stories, in the form of narrative weblog posts, from which story content could be harvested and repurposed. Such repurposing is currently inhibited, however, in that many blog narratives are not sufficiently coherent for use in these applications. In a narrative that is not coherent, the order of the events in the narrative is not clear given the text of the story. We present the results of a study exploring automatic methods for estimating the coherence of narrative blog posts. In the end, our simplest model—one that only considers the degree to which story text is capitalized and punctuated—vastly outperformed a baseline model and, curiously, a series of more sophisticated models. Future work may use this simple model as a baseline, or may use it along with the classifier that it extends to automatically extract large numbers of narrative blog posts from the web for purposes such as interactive storytelling.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here, we acknowledge that such decoupling is used productively in certain storytelling forms and that audience confusion may be socioculturally subjective [22, 34].

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Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without Marilyn Walker, who provided mentorship and funded the annotation procedure presented in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Expressive Intelligence Studio, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, USA

    James Ryan

  2. Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

    Reid Swanson

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  1. James Ryan
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Correspondence to James Ryan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Frank Nack

  2. The Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Andrew S. Gordon

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Ryan, J., Swanson, R. (2016). Recognizing Coherent Narrative Blog Content. In: Nack, F., Gordon, A. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10045. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_21

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