Identifying Narrative Clause Types in Personal Stories
Reid Swanson, Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Thomas Corcoran, Marilyn A. Walker · 2014
This paper describes work on automatically identifying categories of narrative clauses in personal stories written by ordinary peo-ple about their daily lives and experiences. We base our approach on Labov & Walet-zky’s theory of oral narrative which catego-rizes narrative clauses into subtypes, such as ORIENTATION, ACTION and EVALUATION. We describe an experiment where we an-notate 50 personal narratives from weblogs and experiment with methods for achieving higher annotation reliability. We use the re-sulting annotated corpus to train a classi-fier to automatically identify narrative cat-egories, achieving a best average F-score of.658, which rises to an F-score of.767 on the cases with the highest annotator agree-ment. We believe the identified narrative structure will enable new types of compu-tational analysis of narrative discourse. 1