The Need for Multi-Aspectual Representation of Narratives in Modelling their Creative Process

Existing approaches to narrative construction tend to apply basic engineering principles of system design which rely on identifying the most relevant feature of the domain for the problem at hand, and postulating an initial representation of the problem space organised around such a principal feature. Some features that have been favoured in the past include: causality, linear discourse, underlying structure, and character behavior. The present paper defends the need for simultaneous consideration of as many as possible of these aspects when attempting to model the process of creating narratives, together with some mechanism for distributing the weight of the decision processes across them. Humans faced with narrative construction may shift from views based on characters to views based on structure, then consider causality, and later also take into account the shape of discourse. This behavior can be related to the process of representational re-description of constraints as described in existing literature on cognitive models of the writing task. The paper discusses how existing computational models of narrative construction address this phenomenon, and argues for a computational model of narrative explicitly based on multiple aspects

Annotating Musical Theatre Plots on Narrative Structure and Emotional Content

Although theoretical models of the structure of narrative arising from systematic analysis of corpora are available for domains such as Russian folk tales, there are no such sources for the plot lines of musical theatre. The present paper reports an effort of knowledge elicitation for features that characterise the narrative structure of plot in the particular domain of musical theatre. The following aspects are covered: identification of a valid vocabulary of abstract units to use in annotating musical theatre plots, development of a procedure for annotation - including a spread-sheet format for annotators to use, and a corresponding set of instructions to guide them through the process - selection of a corpus of musical theatre pieces that would constitute the corpus to be annotated, the annotation process itself and the results of post-processing the annotated corpus in search for insights on the narrative structure of musical theatre plots

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

The acquisition of finiteness in English by child second language learners in instructed contexts: age of onset and L1 effects

This thesis examines the acquisition of finiteness in English by child L2 learners by investigating the impact of the age of onset and the role of the learners’ L1 on their L2 acquisition. Following Meisel’s hypothesis that children older than 4 will resemble adult L2 acquisition in the domain of inflectional morphology, I investigated how two groups of children of different L1s and older than 4 learn the features of tense and agreement and whether accuracy would be declining as an effect of an older age of onset. Participants were 73 Chinese and 74 Russian learners who were aged either 9 or 12 at time of testing and had age of onset of learning English at ages 4 and 7 respectively. Children were all EFL learners recruited from EF (English First) private afternoon English language schools in Shanghai and Moscow, where children attended classes for a few hours a week. To assess children’s performance, I employed two types of tasks: two elicited production tasks whose prompts involved 3SG-agreement and past tense contexts (TEGI), and a freer type of elicitation prompting stories based on a sequence of pictures (MAIN). Data analysis demonstrated low accuracy, high numbers of omissions, asymmetries in the acquisition of morphemes, overgeneralisation of the progressive tense in 3SG-habitual contexts, and use of the periphrastic structure ‘is + verb(x)’. These results show that L2 children resemble aL2 acquisition supporting Meisel’s hypothesis. The empirical findings are interpreted in light of two opposing views that account for the optionality in verb inflection in L2 acquisition; the Full Access to UG and the Representational Deficit approaches; as argued data are more consistent with a representational deficit account. Older children consistently outperformed younger ones; as features are inaccessible, older learners compensate by relying on their higher cognitive abilities, learning strategies and metalinguistic skills, while younger children are mostly implicit learners using more the periphrastic structure as immersed children do. The periphrastic structure appears to be a stage in L2 development of verb morphology in English which denotes the emergence of finiteness as a category being triggered semantically through interpretable features of be. This is a first stage toward activation of uninterpretable features. Finally, signs of L1 influence became more pronounced in older learners; it was the older children showing more L1 effects, a finding which is again more consistent with a representational deficit account.PhD Studentship Agreement in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics with EF Education Firs

Improving the Fitness Function of an Evolutionary Suspense Generator Through Sentiment Analysis

The perception of suspense in stories is affected not only by general literary aspects like narrative structure and linguistic features, but also by anticipation and evocation of feelings like aversion, disgust or empathy. As such, it is possible to alter the feeling of suspense by modifying components of a story that convey these feelings to the audience. Based on a previous straightforward model of suspense adaptation, this paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a computational system that adapts narrative scenes for conveying a specific user-defined amount of suspense. The system is designed to address the impact of different types of emotional components on the reader. The relative weighted suspense of these components is computed with a regression model based on a sentiment analysis tool, and used as a fitness function in an evolutionary algorithm. This new function is able to identify the different weights on the prediction of suspense in aspects like outcome, decorative elements, or threat's appearance. The results indicate that this approach represents a significant improvement over the previous existing approach

The language-cognition interface in bilinguals: an evaluation of the conceptual transfer hypothesis

Praca podejmuje temat wpływu języka na kategorie konceptualne u osób dwujęzycznych. Poruszana problematyka omawiana jest na podstawie najnowszych teorii pamięci bilingwalnej oraz stworzonej na ich kanwie hipotezy transferu konceptualnego autorstwa Scotta Jarvisa i Anety Pavlenko. Część teoretyczna przedstawia strukturę pamięci bilingwalnej, zwanej również słownikiem wewnętrznym, modele sfery konceptualnej oraz istniejące pomiędzy poziomem językowym i konceptualnym zależności. Te ostatnie rozpatrywane są przez pryzmat teorii względności językowej i jej zmodyfikowanych wersji: teorii „myślenie dla mowy” (ang. Thinking for Speaking) Dana Slobina, jak również hipotezy Christiane von Stutterheim. Ostatnim elementem dyskusji jest prezentacja hipotezy transferu konceptualnego oraz jej ocena pod kątem merytorycznym i empirycznym. Część badawcza przedstawia dwa projekty zrealizowane zgodnie z zaleceniami autorów hipotezy transferu konceptualnego. Projekt 1. dotyczy kategoryzacji semantycznej oraz niewerbalnej. Badane kategorie semantyczne oparte są na eksplikacjach Anny Wierzbickiej i dotyczą relacji międzyludzkich (przyjaciel, friend, kolega itd.). Projekt 2. to analiza ram konceptualizacyjnych pod kątem wydarzeń przedstawiających ruch ukierunkowany oraz konstrukcji narracji w pisemnych relacjach z obejrzanego filmu animowanego. Uzyskane dane w języku polskim i angielskim stanowią podstawę wniosków, które zaprezentowano w ostatnim rozdziale pracy. Badania przeprowadzono w Polsce i krajach anglojęzycznych (w Anglii i Irlandii). W skład badanych populacji weszli monolingwalni Polacy i rodzimi użytkownicy języka angielskiego (ang. native speakers) oraz Polacy posługujący się językiem angielskim w warunkach naturalnych (emigranci) i szkolnych (studenci filologii angielskiej). Każda z grup monolingwalnych uczestniczyła w sesjach badawczych dotyczących odpowiednio języka polskiego i angielskiego. Osoby dwujęzyczne testowane były w obydwu językach. Dane zebrano za pomocą scenariuszy sytuacyjnych, kwestionariuszy, oceny podobieństwa, a także opisu narracyjnego krótkometrażowego filmu animowanego pt. Katedra w reżyserii Tomasza Bagińskiego

Storyscope: Supporting the authoring and reading of museum stories using online data sources

Museum staff tell stories to assist visitor interpretation of artworks. Visitors also tell their own stories to articulate their understanding and opinion of artworks. Additional knowledge about the concepts mentioned or tagged in these stories can be found from online data sources. These could be used to assist reader interpretation or author development of stories. However, the potentially vast network of heterogeneous knowledge that can be created around the tags or annotations of a story could be bewildering for the story reader or author. Here we present Storyscope, a test-bed environment for the authoring, reading and semantic annotation of museum stories. The integration of online knowledge within the task of story authoring or interpretation is facilitated by mapping the available knowledge to a set of facts and simple events related to each story annotation. Narrative principles of theme and setting are used to discover and highlight aspects of the knowledge of potential value to the author or reader. Preliminary studies indicate the potential of the approach for providing a form of semantic navigation across stories and concepts having a better cognitive fit to story related tasks than existing forms of navigation

Beyond ‘Interaction’: How to Understand Social Effects on Social Cognition

In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an ‘interactive turn’ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of ‘interaction’ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the ‘interactionist’ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of ‘interaction’, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition

Point of View in Ulysses: a critical application of Palmer’s approach to the representation of consciousness

Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel that has proven notoriously hard to pin down in terms of what is going on at any given point. Viewpoints shift throughout, and at times even appear to merge into one another. Previous approaches to point of view in the novel have tended to use one of a number of discrete analytical approaches, looking primarily at explicitly marked indicators of either consciousness or deixis. They have ignored sources of information about fictional minds that are not explicitly cued as such, such as those found in the adverbs used to describe characters’ speech, or in narrative descriptions of their actions. My contention was such analytical approaches, focusing on explicitly marked depictions of consciousness in novels (for which Ulysses is famous), might be strengthened by looking at generally ignored, more subtle indications of mental functioning, in order to provide a fuller picture of what is going on in this complex work. All indicators of consciousness are seen as valid within this approach; it is therefore one that incorporates any example of situated mental functioning to be found in the novel. Drawing upon potentially any indicator of mental functioning, within a more holistic overview of consciousness in the novel, was found to provide a fuller, yet still linguistically focused account, and one which was also more cognitively salient. It is derived in part from Palmer’s ideas regarding how characters’ situated mental functioning might be tracked, using non-standard indicators of consciousness. Such information, Palmer has suggested, is stored in continuing consciousness frames for characters that then feed into embedded narratives for them. This is then stored within their overall ‘fictional’ encyclopaedias for the text in hand. This is a subsection of readers’ much larger ‘internal’ encyclopaedias, which contain all of the knowledge they possess; this is narrowed down to only the most relevant elements by the text itself i.e. through a text-driven process, and then stored in discrete ‘’fictional’ encyclopaedias, specific to the current text. Palmer’s ideas were then developed in terms of ideas developed by Fludernik and others, and also current thinking within cognitive science. My contention is that a reader will subjectively enter the text at any indication of mental function, in order to understand it from a first person perspective within such a consciousness frame. This point I have termed ‘subjective centre point’. These are relatively new approaches to analysing point of view in novels, and this is the first time such ideas have been applied to Ulysses, which has, however, attracted the attention of a good deal of traditional approaches to this topic. By applying a variety of ideas to a selection of episodes from Ulysses, it was shown that these non-standard indicators of consciousness, when incorporated within a more eclectic approach to subjectivity in the novel, deepened the insights afforded by looking at explicitly marked subjective elements of the text alone. The logical extension of this is to incorporate further approaches that will enable fuller, more truly holistic, analyses to be undertaken