Using narrative functions as a heuristic for relevance in story understanding
Emmett Tomai, Ken Forbus · 2010
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.