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Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
31 May 1980-
About: The article was published on 1980-05-31 and is currently open access. It has received 1885 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Narrative structure & Narrative criticism.
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12 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined the effect of mixed emotions in advertising on word of mouth (WOM) and the moderating role of a narrative person and found that a mixed emotional appeal is more effective than pure happiness in increasing positive WOM when the third-person narration is used.
12 citations
01 Nov 2019
TL;DR: This article proposed a simple and effective modeling framework for controlled generation of multiple, diverse outputs, focusing on the setting of generating the next sentence of a story given its context, including sentiment, length, predicates, frames, and automatically-induced clusters.
Abstract: We propose a simple and effective modeling framework for controlled generation of multiple, diverse outputs. We focus on the setting of generating the next sentence of a story given its context. As controllable dimensions, we consider several sentence attributes, including sentiment, length, predicates, frames, and automatically-induced clusters. Our empirical results demonstrate: (1) our framework is accurate in terms of generating outputs that match the target control values; (2) our model yields increased maximum metric scores compared to standard n-best list generation via beam search; (3) controlling generation with semantic frames leads to a stronger combination of diversity and quality than other control variables as measured by automatic metrics. We also conduct a human evaluation to assess the utility of providing multiple suggestions for creative writing, demonstrating promising results for the potential of controllable, diverse generation in a collaborative writing system.
12 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of Arrian's Indikē have examined the narrative techniques through which Arrian exploited exotic stories about the Macedonian navy's voyage in the Indian sea in his effort not only to entertain his readers but also to shape a favorable image for the protagonists.
Abstract: BY UNDERTAKING to narrate the navigation of the Indian coastline by the Macedonian fleet, Arrian aspired to compose a work which, along with the Anabasis of Alexander, would serve as an integral part of his prosopography of Alexander. On the other hand, Arrian was also fully aware of the fact that, in writing the Indian account, he was also invited to follow a long tradition of exotic literature on the mirabilia of India. As a result, in the Indikē the reader is offered the opportunity to meet with passages that serve both the author’s need to amuse and his intention to focus on the characters of Alexander and Nearchus.Although modern scholarship has repeatedly noted the twofold nature of the work, little attention has been paid to if and how these two goals intermingle on a narrative level. The present study constitutes the first narratological analysis of Arrian’s Indikē and elaborates exactly on this question: How did Arrian manage to reach a compromise in his narrative between these two goals of the work, the amusement of the reader and the delineation of Alexander’s and Nearchus’ literary portraits? By drawing from recent outcomes of psychology, theory of literature, and narratology, I examine the narrative techniques through which Arrian exploits exotic stories about the Macedonian navy’s voyage in the Indian Sea in his effort not only to entertain his readers but also to shape a favorable image for the protagonists. The main point of argument of this essay is that the exotic and amusing elements of the Indikē should not be seen cut off from the literary representation of Alexander’s and Nearchus’ intellectual and moral qualities but as a part of this representation. The basic narrative technique, through which Arrian combines elements of exotic content and characterization, is the creation of suspense.
12 citations
01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: This work presents an implemented system, EA NLU, which has been used to interpret narrative text input to cognitive modeling simulations, and explores the use of a theory of narrative functions as a heuristic guide to interpretation in EANLU.
Abstract: Narrative understanding is a hard problem for artificial intelligence that requires deep semantic understanding of natural language and broad world knowledge. Early research in this area stalled due to the difficulty of knowledge engineering and a trend in the field towards robustness at the expense of depth. This work explores how a practical integration of more recent resources and theories for natural language understanding can perform deep semantic interpretation of narratives when guided by specific pragmatic constraints. It shows how cognitive models can provide pragmatic context for narrative understanding in terms of well-defined reasoning tasks, and how those tasks can be used to guide interpretation and evaluate understanding.
This work presents an implemented system, EA NLU, which has been used to interpret narrative text input to cognitive modeling simulations. EA NLU integrates existing large-scale knowledge resources with a controlled grammar and a compositional semantic interpretation process to generate highly expressive logical representations of sentences. Delayed disambiguation and representations from dynamic logic are used to separate this compositional process from a querydriven discourse interpretation process that is guided by pragmatic concerns and uses world knowledge. By isolating explicit points of ambiguity and using limited evidential abduction, this query-driven process can automatically identify the disambiguation choices that entail relevant interpretations. This work shows how this approach maintains computational tractability without sacrificing expressive power. EA NLU is evaluated through a series of experiments with two cognitive models, showing that it is capable of meeting the deep reasoning requirements those models pose, and that the constraints provided by the models can effectively guide the interpretation process. By enforcing consistent interpretation principles, EA NLU benefits the cognitive modeling experiments by reducing the opportunities for tailoring the input.
This work also explores the use of a theory of narrative functions as a heuristic guide to interpretation in EA NLU. In contrast to potentially global task-specific queries, these narrative functions can be inferred on a sentence-by-sentence basis, providing incremental disambiguation. This method is evaluated by interpreting a set of Aesop's fables, and showing that the interpretations are sufficient to capture the intended lesson of each fable.
12 citations