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Towards Automatic Detection of Narrative Structure

We present novel computational experiments using William Labov’s theory of narrative analysis. We describe his six elements of narrative structure and construct a new corpus based on his most recent work on narrative. Using this corpus, we explore the correspondence between Labov’s elements of narrative structure and the implicit discourse relations of the Penn Discourse Treebank, and we construct a mapping between the elements of narrative structure and the discourse relation classes of the PDTB. We present first experiments on detecting Complicating Actions, the most common of the elements of narrative structure, achieving an f-score of 71.55. We compare the contributions of features derived from narrative analysis, such as the length of clauses and the tenses of main verbs, with those of features drawn from work on detecting implicit discourse relations. Finally, we suggest directions for future research on narrative structure, such as applications in assessing text quality and in narrative generation.