Inferring Narrative Causality between Event Pairs in Films

To understand narrative, humans draw inferences about the underlying relations between narrative events. Cognitive theories of narrative understanding define these inferences as four different types of causality, that include pairs of events A, B where A physically causes B (X drop, X break), to pairs of events where A causes emotional state B (Y saw X, Y felt fear). Previous work on learning narrative relations from text has either focused on "strict" physical causality, or has been vague about what relation is being learned. This paper learns pairs of causal events from a corpus of film scene descriptions which are action rich and tend to be told in chronological order. We show that event pairs induced using our methods are of high quality and are judged to have a stronger causal relation than event pairs from Rel-grams

Understanding Actors and Evaluating Personae with Gaussian Embeddings

Understanding narrative content has become an increasingly popular topic. Nonetheless, research on identifying common types of narrative characters, or personae, is impeded by the lack of automatic and broad-coverage evaluation methods. We argue that computationally modeling actors provides benefits, including novel evaluation mechanisms for personae. Specifically, we propose two actor-modeling tasks, cast prediction and versatility ranking, which can capture complementary aspects of the relation between actors and the characters they portray. For an actor model, we present a technique for embedding actors, movies, character roles, genres, and descriptive keywords as Gaussian distributions and translation vectors, where the Gaussian variance corresponds to actors' versatility. Empirical results indicate that (1) the technique considerably outperforms TransE (Bordes et al. 2013) and ablation baselines and (2) automatically identified persona topics (Bamman, O'Connor, and Smith 2013) yield statistically significant improvements in both tasks, whereas simplistic persona descriptors including age and gender perform inconsistently, validating prior research.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 201

Causality inspired retrieval of human-object interactions from video

Notwithstanding recent advances in machine vision, video activity recognition from multiple cameras still remains a challenging task as many real-world interactions cannot be automatically recognised for many reasons, such as partial occlusion or coverage black-spots. In this paper we propose a new technique that infers the unseen relationship between two individuals captured by different cameras and use it to retrieve relevant video clips if there is a likely interaction between the two individuals. We introduce a human object interaction (HOI) model integrating the causal relationship between the humans and the objects. For this we first extract the key frames and generate the labels or annotations using the state-of-the-art image captioning models. Next, we extract SVO (subject, verb, object) triples and encode the descriptions into a vector form for HOI inference using the Stanford CoreNLP parser. In order to calculate the HOI co-existence and the possible causality score we use transfer entropy. From our experimentation, we found that integrating casual relations into the content indexing process and using transfer entropy to calculate the causality score leads to improvement in retrieval performance

A domain-independent model of suspense in narrative

Many computational models of narrative have focussed on the structure of the narrative world. Such models have been implemented in a wide variety of systems, often linked to characters’ goals and plans, where the goal of creating suspenseful stories is baked into the structure of each system. There is no portable, independently motivated idea of what makes a suspenseful story. Our approach is instead to take the phenomenon of suspense as the starting point. We extend an existing psychological model of narrative by Brewer and Lichtenstein (1982) which postulates suspense, curiosity and surprise as the fundamental elements of entertaining stories. We build a formal model of these phenomena using structures we call narrative threads. Narrative threads are a formal description of a reader’s expectations about what might happen next in a given story. Our model uses a measure for the imminence of the predicted conflict between narrative threads to create a suspense profile for a given story. We also identify two types of suspense: conflict-based and revelatory suspense. We tested the validity of our model by asking participants to give step- by-step self-reported suspense levels on reading online story variants. The results show that the normalised average scores of participants (N = 46) are in agreement with the values predicted by our model to a high level of statistical significance. Our model’s interface with storyworld knowledge is compatible with recent developments in automatic harvesting of world knowledge in the form of event chains such as Chambers and Jurafsky (2008). This means that it is in principle scalable. By disentangling suspense from specific narrative content and planning strategies, we arrive at a domain-independent model that can be reused within different narrative generation systems. We see our work as a signpost to encourage the further development of narrative models based on what we see as its fundamental ingredients

Visual arguments in film

Nuestro objetivo es señalar algunas diferencias entre los argumentos verbales y visuales, y promover la perspectiva retórica de la argumentación, yendo más allá de la relevancia de la lógica y de la pragmática. En nuestra opinión, si ha de ser racional y aceptable como argumentación (visual), un film debe dirigirse a espectadores que tienen creencias informadas sobre el tema visto en la pantalla y sobre las limitaciones y las convenciones del medio. En nuestras reflexiones, aplicamos el análisis retórico al cine como un acto simbólico, humano y comunicativo que a veces puede entenderse como un argumento trazado visualmente. Como mezcla de estímulos visuales, auditivos y verbales, el film exige una interpretación y una (re)construcción activas y complejas. Nuestra sugerencia es concentrarse en cinco elementos diferentes, pero relacionados entre sí. La reconstrucción y la evaluación del argumento visual se basarán en esos elementos, y todo el proceso constituirá una argumentación visual.Our aim is to point out some differences between verbal and visual arguments, promoting the rhetorical perspective of argumentation beyond the relevance of logic and pragmatics. In our view, if it is to be rational and successful, film as (visual) argumentation must be addressed to spectators who hold informed beliefs about the theme watched on the screen and the medium’s constraints and conventions. In our reflections to follow, we apply rhetorical analysis to film as a symbolic, human, and communicative act that may sometimes be understood as a visually laid out argument. As a mixture of visual, auditory, and verbal stimuli, film demands active and complex interpretation and (re)construction. Our suggestion is to focus on five different but interrelated elements. The reconstruction and evaluation of the visual argument will be based on those elements, and the whole process will be one of visual argumentation

Explicit oral narrative intervention for students with Williams syndrome

Narrative skills play a crucial role in organizing experience, facilitating social interaction and building academic discourse and literacy. They are at the interface of cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities related to school engagement. Despite their relative strengths in social and grammatical skills, students with Williams syndrome (WS) do not show parallel cognitive and pragmatic performance in narrative generation tasks. The aim of the present study was to assess retelling of a TV cartoon tale and the effect of an individualized explicit instruction of the narrative structure. Participants included eight students with WS who attended different special education levels. Narratives were elicited in two sessions (pre and post intervention), and were transcribed, coded and analyzed using the tools of the CHILDES Project. Narratives were coded for productivity and complexity at the microstructure and macrostructure levels. Microstructure productivity (i.e., length of narratives) included number of utterances, clauses, and tokens. Microstructure complexity included mean length of utterances, lexical diversity and use of discourse markers as cohesive devices. Narrative macrostructure was assessed for textual coherence through the Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol for Speech Corpora (PREP-CORP). Macrostructure productivity and complexity included, respectively, the recall and sequential order of scenarios, episodes, events and characters. A total of four intervention sessions, lasting approximately 20 min, were delivered individually once a week. This brief intervention addressed explicit instruction about the narrative structure and the use of specific discourse markers to improve cohesion of story retellings. Intervention strategies included verbal scaffolding and modeling, conversational context for retelling the story and visual support with pictures printed from the cartoon. Results showed significant changes in WS students’ retelling of the story, both at macro- and microstructure levels, when assessed following a 2-week interval. Outcomes were better in microstructure than in macrostructure, where sequential order (i.e., complexity) did not show significant improvement. These findings are consistent with previous research supporting the use of explicit oral narrative intervention with participants who are at risk of school failure due to communication impairments. Discussion focuses on how assessment and explicit instruction of narrative skills might contribute to effective intervention programs enhancing school engagement in WS students

Film as Embodied Art

How do the visuals of Kubrick’s work convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words? And how does the pure instrumental music in his films express meaning when music, in essence, is an abstract art form? Drawing on state-of-the-art research in embodied cognitive science, this book sets out to explore these questions by revealing Kubrick as a genuine conceptual artist, a filmmaker who perhaps more than any other director, uses all the non-verbal resources of filmmaking in such a controlled and dense manner as to elicit the bodily structures necessary to achieve a level of conceptual understanding