Fisseni, B.

Löwe, B.

English

We present a survey of the results and findings of the research project "What makes stories similar?" funded by the John Templeton Foundation from October 2011 to May 2014

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UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl)UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)What Makes Stories Similar? Report on a Research Project, 2011-2014Fisseni, B.; Löwe, B.DOI10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2014.9Publication date2014Document VersionFinal published versionPublished in5th Workshop on Computational Models of NarrativeLicenseCC BYLink to publicationCitation for published version (APA):Fisseni, B., & Löwe, B. (2014). What Makes Stories Similar? Report on a Research Project,2011-2014. In M. A. Finlayson, J. C. Meister, & E. C. Bruneau (Eds.), 5th Workshop onComputational Models of Narrative: CMN’14, July 31–August 2, 2014, Quebec City, Canada(pp. 9-12). (Open Access Series in Informatics; Vol. 41). Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrumfür Informatik. https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2014.9General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s)and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an opencontent license (like Creative Commons).Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, pleaselet the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the materialinaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letterto: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Youwill be contacted as soon as possible.Download date:10 Mar 2023What Makes Stories Similar? Report on aResearch Project, 2011–2014Bernhard Fisseni1 and Benedikt Löwe2,31 Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften, Universität Duisburg-EssenUniversitätsstraße 12, 45117 Essen, Germanybernhard.fisseni@uni-due.de2 Institute for Logic, Language and Computation,Universiteit van AmsterdamPostbus 94242, 1090 GE Amsterdam, The Netherlandsb.loewe@uva.nl3 Fachbereich Mathematik, Universität Hamburg,Bundesstraße 55, 20146 Hamburg, GermanyAbstractWe present a survey of the results and findings of the research projectWhat makes stories similar?funded by the John Templeton Foundation from October 2011 to May 2014.1998 ACM Subject Classification H.1.m Models and Principles: Miscellaneous, H.3.1 ContentAnalysis and Indexing, I.2.7 Natural Language Processing, I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Form-alisms and Methods, J.4 Social and Behavioral Sciences, J.5 Arts and HumanitiesKeywords and phrases narratives, similarity, empirical studiesDigital Object Identifier 10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2014.9Category Invited Report1 OverviewIn analytic philosophy, the notion of similarity has created a great deal of debate [1, 15]. Twoentities can be similar in many different respects while being dissimilar in other respects; thephilosopher is interested in which of the features according to which entities can be similar ordissimilar are essential in a given situation. This philosophical debate becomes an interestingtopic of scientific inquiry when there is a chance to make an intuitive notion of similarityprecise and measurable and when different measures of similarity can be compared in theirrelationship to the actual human practice of narrative similarity judgments.The research project What makes stories similar? funded by the John Templeton Found-ation from October 2011 to May 2014 aimed at providing a methodological discussion ofmeasures of similarity for narratives, some candidates for such measures, tools and techniquesfor comparing the measures, and empirical results using these tools and techniques. Guidedby its eponymous question and based on [11, 12], the project aimed to find out whether thereare structural (rather than presentational) properties that contribute or even define storysimilarity, whether they can be expressed in formal representation systems, and how suchrepresentations can be empirically tested.2 People involvedThe project What makes stories similar? was based at the Universität Hamburg and wascoordinated by the second author of the present paper as principal investigator; Carlos© Bernhard Fisseni and Benedikt Löwe;licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY5th Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’14).Editors: Mark A. Finlayson, Jan Christoph Meister, and Emile G. Bruneau; pp. 9–12OpenAccess Series in InformaticsSchloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl Publishing, Germany10 What Makes Stories Similar? Report on a Research ProjectTable 1 The empirical research performed as part of the project What makes stories similar?with publication references. There were two more experiments on Lehnert’s Plot Units [10] and theDoxastic Preference Framework of [13, 14] during the March 2013 seminar. These results are as ofnow unpublished.Experiment Date Language PaperPropp I November 2011 English [2]Propp II December 2011 English [2]Queneau I October 2011 German [8]Queneau II December 2011 German [8]Fairy Tales December 2011 German [8]Summaries January 2012 German [9]Eliciting Variation August to December 2012 English/German [7]Propp III March 2013 English + German [5]Propp IV August 2013 German [5]León and the first author of the present paper were researchers on positions funded by theproject; Alexander Block, Varun Dwarakanathan, Deniz Sarikaya, and Mira Viehstädt werestudent assistants funded by the project. In addition to this, the researchers in the projectclosely collaborated with Rens Bod, Faith Lawrence and Aadil Kurji; the researchers becamemembers of the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology (ICN) at Universität Hamburg andhave interacted with the ICN researchers, among others, by co-teaching a two-week course,organizing the workshop Computational Models of Narrative 2013 (CMN 2013) in Hamburg,and by participating in scientific exchange at the Narratological Colloquium.3 ActivitiesOne of the main activities of the project was to develop a series of experiments listed inTable 1 with pointers to the relevant publications. Since some of the experiments requiredextensive training of the test subjects, it was natural to link some of the experiments totraining courses in formal models of narratives. Deniz Sarikaya organized one such courseentitled Formale Ansätze in der Erzählforschung at the Universität Hamburg, funded in theprogramme StipendiatInnen machen Programm of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes,and the experiment Propp III was performed during this course by the authors togetherwith Aadil Kurji. Together with Marco Petris, the authors taught a two-week course entitledDigitalisierung und Formalisierung von Erzählstruktur at the Sommerakademie XV 2013 ofthe Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes held at Schloss Salem; the experiment Propp IVwas part of this course. In addition to the experiments listed in Table 1, the project usedcorpus research [6] and formal modelling [9].Several intensive work meetings took place: in Amsterdam in October 2011 and in Cam-bridge in February 2012, when several members of the project were all there as visiting fellowsduring the programme Semantics & Syntax at the Isaac Newton Institute for MathematicalScience; furthermore, the project organized a panel session entitled Computational models ofnarrative structure at the conference Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg, the workshopComputational Models of Narrative 2013 in Hamburg as well as a symposium at the AnnualMeeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) in Berlin entitled Computational andCognitive Aspects of Narratives.B. Fisseni and B. Löwe 11The project produced a number of publications [12, 2, 8, 9, 6, 7, 5] in which the findingsof the activities mentioned above were published. Some of the experimental results willbe documented in future publications. Together with Mark Finlayson and Jan ChristophMeister, the authors of this report edited the CMN 2013 proceedings volume [4]. At themoment, a special issue of Sprache und Datenverarbeitung, the major German print journalon computational linguistics, is prepared with contributions by leading researchers in ourfield.Acknowledgements. The project What makes stories similar? was funded by the JohnTempleton Foundation (20565). Additional funding for some of the research activities wasprovided by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) via theprojects Integrating Cognition in the VICI programme (DN 277-70-006) and DialogicalFoundations of Semantics in the ESF EuroCoRes programme LogICCC (LogICCC-FP004;DN 231-80-002; CN 2008/08314/GW), the Vlaams Academisch Centrum at the KoninklijkeVlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, the Isaac Newton Institutefor Mathematical Sciences in the programme Semantics & Syntax), and the Studienstiftungdes deutschen Volkes. The workshop Computational Models of Narrative 2013 held as partof the project was co-funded by the Minerva Program at the United States Office of theSecretary of Defense, the United States Office of Naval Research Global (ONR-G) and theCognitive Science Society. The authors wish to thank all collaborators and all test subjectswho participated in the experiments listed in Table 1.References1 Paul Bartha. Analogy and analogical reasoning. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2013 edition, 2013.2 Rens Bod, Bernhard Fisseni, Aadil Kurji, and Benedikt Löwe. Objectivity and reproducib-ility of Proppian narrative annotations. In Finlayson [3], pages 17–21.3 Mark A. Finlayson, editor. The Third Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative,İstanbul, 2012.4 Mark A. Finlayson, Bernhard Fisseni, Benedikt Löwe, and Jan Christoph Meister, editors.2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, volume 32 of OpenAccess Seriesin Informatics (OASIcs). Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl,Germany, 2013.5 Bernhard Fisseni, Aadil Kurji, and Benedikt Löwe. Annotating with Propp’s Morphologyof the Folktale: Reproducibility and trainability, submitted.6 Bernhard Fisseni, Aadil Kurji, Deniz Sarikaya, and Mira Viehstädt. Story comparisons:Evidence from film reviews. In Finlayson et al. [4], pages 94–99.7 Bernhard Fisseni and Faith Lawrence. A paradigm for eliciting story variation. In Finlaysonet al. [4], pages 100–105.8 Bernhard Fisseni and Benedikt Löwe. Which dimensions of narratives are relevant forhuman judgments of story equivalence? In Finlayson [3], pages 114–118.9 Bernhard Fisseni and Benedikt Löwe. Event-mappings for comparing frameworks for nar-ratives. Logique et Analyse, to appear.10 Wendy G. Lehnert. Plot units and narrative summarization. Cognitive Science, 5(4):293–331, 1981.11 Benedikt Löwe. Comparing formal frameworks of narrative structures. In Mark Finlayson,editor, Computational models of narrative. Papers from the 2010 AAAI Fall Symposium,volume FS-10-04 of AAAI Technical Reports, pages 45–46, 2010.CMN’1412 What Makes Stories Similar? Report on a Research Project12 Benedikt Löwe. Methodological remarks about comparing formal frameworks for nar-ratives. In Patrick Allo and Giuseppe Primiero, editors, Third Workshop in the Philo-sophy of Information, Contactforum van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgiëvoor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, pages 10–28, Brussel, 2011. KVAB.13 Benedikt Löwe and Eric Pacuit. An abstract approach to reasoning about games withmistaken and changing beliefs. Australasian Journal of Logic, 6:162–181, 2008.14 Benedikt Löwe, Eric Pacuit, and Sanchit Saraf. Identifying the structure of a narrative viaan agent-based logic of preferences and beliefs: Formalizations of episodes from CSI: CrimeScene Investigation™. In Michael Duvigneau and Daniel Moldt, editors, Proceedings of theFifth International Workshop on Modelling of Objects, Components and Agents. MOCA’09,FBI-HH-B-290/09, pages 45–63, 2009.15 Harold Noonan. Identity. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philo-sophy. Winter 2011 edition, 2011.

What Makes Stories Similar? Report on a Research Project, 2011-2014

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What Makes Stories Similar? Report on a Research Project, 2011-2014

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