Quantitative Characteristics of Human-Written Short Stories as a Metric for Automated Storytelling

Evaluating the extent to which computer-produced stories are structured like human-invented narratives can be an important component of the quality of a story plot. In this paper, we report on an empirical experiment in which human subjects have invented short plots in a constrained scenario. The stories were annotated according to features commonly found in existing automatic story generators. The annotation was designed to measure the proportion and relations of story components that should be used in automatic computational systems for matching human behaviour. Results suggest that there are relatively common patterns that can be used as input data for identifying similarity to human-invented stories in automatic storytelling systems. The found patterns are in line with narratological models, and the results provide numerical quantification and layout of story components. The proposed method of story analysis is tested over two additional sources, the ROCStories corpus and stories generated by automated storytellers, to illustrate the valuable insights that may be derived from them

Communication, digital media and future: new scenarios and future changes

Proceedings of the MEDCOM 2020+1 International Conferenc

Communication, digital media and future: new scenarios and future changes

Digital media, technology, new theoretical perspectives have revolutionized the ways of interacting among individuals, acquiring information and knowledge, teaching, behaving in multicultural society and so on and so forth. The impact of new ways of communicating, social media, political platforms on daily lives is evident. Multifaced and different aspects of these topics have been discussed in the VI World conference on Media and Communication (MEDCOM), which was supposed to be held in Cagliari, in May 2020, and it has been postponed to June 2021, online. During that year, communicating revealed even more relevant for citizen live. We assisted to the great importance of best practices in crisis communication, and the critical situations generated by fake news and information overload. Many different topics and fields were included in the conference and, in this volume, we collected 22 papers representative of the discussion, open to scholars from all over the world. The volume is organized in 8 sessions, each one exploring one specific topic: 1. Social Media: Impact, Future, Issues; 2. Public Sector Communication; 3. Politics, Ethics and Communication; Section: 4 Multiculturalism, Cultural Studies, Youth, and Gender Communication; 5 Media Education; 6 Media and Corporate; 7 Screen Cultures; 8 Communication and Covid-19 Pandemic. The last session has been added to the conference after the first postponement to favor analysis of the future development of communication and its complexity after the pandemic experience

Cognitive and neural mechanisms of sense of self in neurodegenerative disorders

The ability to maintain a coherent and continuous ‘sense of self’ is a fundamental component of being human, enabling us to interact and function successfully in everyday life. While a sense of self is commonly accepted to involve both ‘extended’ (i.e., memories) and ‘interpersonal’ (i.e., social) elements, the precise cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these aspects of the self remain poorly understood. This thesis draws upon theory and methods from contemporary cognitive neuroscience to examine the neurocognitive underpinnings of the extended and interpersonal self in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), semantic dementia (SD), and the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD): neurodegenerative disorders involving progressive cognitive and behavioural change as the result of degeneration to distinct brain networks. Employing a novel experimental method (the ‘NExt’ taxonomy), Part 1 of the thesis (Chapters 3 and 4) reveals how a full spectrum of episodic and semantic memory representations may be drawn upon to support one’s past and future life stories, giving rise to a sense of continuity of the extended self. Part 2 (Chapters 5 and 6) illustrates how the complex social interactions that comprise the interpersonal self may be deconstructed into several distinct, yet interacting, psychological components. Furthermore, neuroimaging analyses uncover widespread neural regions to be associated with both the extended and interpersonal aspects of the self, incorporating brain networks beyond those typically implicated in self-related processing. The improved neurocognitive characterisation of the self provided by this thesis highlights the complex, multifaceted nature of this construct. Moreover, from a clinical perspective, distinct profiles of the self unveiled across AD, SD, and bvFTD reveal how ultimately, ‘all is not lost’ in neurodegeneration

Cognitive Resources Are Recruited Consistently Across People During Story Listening

Degraded speech encoding as a result of hearing loss increases cognitive load and makes listening effortful. Standard hearing assessment does not capture this cognitive impact of hearing impairment. Speech-in-noise testing measures intelligibility for isolated sentences that are typically not engaging and lack meaningful context. These materials may not capture the processes involved in everyday listening situations, in which people are often intrinsically motivated to comprehend the speech they are hearing. The current study explored a novel approach using natural, spoken stories. We first characterized time courses of executive load during story listening in young individuals with normal hearing using a reaction time (RT) task. We then computed correlations between executive load time courses (operationalized as reaction times) to quantify their reliability. Reaction-time time courses were significantly correlated across participants, suggesting consistent cognitive recruitment across individuals. Synchronization of RTs across participants was related to ratings of story enjoyment, but not absorption, suggesting that enjoyment, one key facet of engagement, predicts the degree to which a story’s cognitive demands are experienced similarly by listeners. Correlated executive load time courses among healthy individuals may be sensitive to abnormal mental states: divergence from the canonical time courses characterized here could serve as a sensitive tool for characterizing listening effort

Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism, one of the twentieth century's most important movements in literary criticism, has received far less attention than most of its rivals. Examining Formalism in light of more recent developments in literary theory, Peter Steiner here offers the most comprehensive critique of Formalism to date. Steiner studies the work of the Formalists in terms of the major tropes that characterized their thought. He first considers those theorists who viewed a literary work as a mechanism, an organism, or a system. He then turns to those who sought to reduce literature to its most basic element.<p

The Logic of Invention

In this long-awaited sequel to The Invention of Culture, Roy Wagner tackles the logic and motives that underlie cultural invention. Could there be a single, logical factor that makes the invention of the distinction between self and other possible, much as specific human genes allow for language? Wagner explores what he calls “the reciprocity of perspectives” through a journey between Euro-American bodies of knowledge and his in-depth knowledge of Melanesian modes of thought. This logic grounds variants of the subject/object transformation, as Wagner works through examples such as the figure-ground reversal in Gestalt psychology, Lacan’s theory of the mirror-stage formation of the Ego, and even the self-recursive structure of the aphorism and the joke. Juxtaposing Wittgenstein’s and Leibniz’s philosophy with Melanesian social logic, Wagner explores the cosmological dimensions of the ways in which different societies develop models of self and the subject/object distinction

Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama

The contributions in this edited volume approach poetry, narrative, and drama from the perspective of Computational Stylistics. They exemplify methods of computational textual analysis and explore the possibility of computational generation of literary texts. The volume presents a range of computational and Natural Language Processing applications to literary studies, such as motif detection, network analysis, machine learning, and deep learning