COLING 2020main9 citations
Modeling Event Salience in Narratives via Barthes’ Cardinal Functions
Takaki Otake, Sho Yokoi, Naoya Inoue, Ryo Takahashi, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Kentaro Inui
Abstract
Events in a narrative differ in salience: some are more important to the story than others. Estimating event salience is useful for tasks such as story generation, and as a tool for text analysis in narratology and folkloristics. To compute event salience without any annotations, we adopt Barthes’ definition of event salience and propose several unsupervised methods that require only a pre-trained language model. Evaluating the proposed methods on folktales with event salience annotation, we show that the proposed methods outperform baseline methods and find fine-tuning a language model on narrative texts is a key factor in improving the proposed methods.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{otake-etal-2020-modeling,
title = "Modeling Event Salience in Narratives via Barthes' Cardinal Functions",
author = "Otake, Takaki and
Yokoi, Sho and
Inoue, Naoya and
Takahashi, Ryo and
Kuribayashi, Tatsuki and
Inui, Kentaro",
editor = "Scott, Donia and
Bel, Nuria and
Zong, Chengqing",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = dec,
year = "2020",
address = "Barcelona, Spain (Online)",
publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.160/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.160",
pages = "1784--1794"
}