We present the ongoing activities and the first results achieved in a research project concerning the understanding of narrative in the high school. Students and teachers experimented with new ways to learn linguistic and digital skills, by using a collaborative learning environment built around the novel I Promessi Sposi. We analyzed the literary text, extracting social networks of characters and other fundamental narrative elements (sequences, locations, etc.), in order to provide the students with appropriate tools and resources to conduct their own inquiries on the novel

Bolioli, Andrea

Casu, Matteo

Lana, Maurizio

Roda, Renato

Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server

Exploring the Betrothed Lovers∗Andrea Bolioli1, Matteo Casu2, Maurizio Lana3, and Renato Roda41 Cross Library Services srlTrento, Italybolioli@cross-library.com2 CELI srlTorino, Italycasu@celi.it3 Dipartimento di Studi UmanisticiUniversità degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli, Italym.lana@lett.unipmn.it4 Dipartimento di Culture, Politiche, SocietàUniversità degli Studi di Torino, Torino, Italyrenato.roda@unito.itAbstractWe present the ongoing activities and the first results achieved in a research project concerningthe understanding of narrative in the high school. Students and teachers experimented with newways to learn linguistic and digital skills, by using a collaborative learning environment builtaround the novel I Promessi Sposi. We analyzed the literary text, extracting social networksof characters and other fundamental narrative elements (sequences, locations, etc.), in order toprovide the students with appropriate tools and resources to conduct their own inquiries on thenovel.1998 ACM Subject Classification I.2.7 Natural Language ProcessingKeywords and phrases Computational modelling of narratives, Educational content, Ontologies,Social Network AnalyticsDigital Object Identifier 10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2013.301 IntroductionIn this paper we describe the ongoing activities and the first results achieved in a researchproject concerning the understanding of narrative in the high school. The project partnersare four Italian high schools (in the province of Trento), the Human Language Technologyresearch unit at FBK-irst, two small enterprises, and two public educational organizations(IPRASE and Centro Formazione Insegnanti). The research project Sharing EducationalContent (Sèduco) aims to study, develop and test digital tools for the creation, managementand sharing of educational resources in the Italian upper secondary school (age 14 to 18).Two ongoing activities in the project are concerned with the topic of narrative under-standing:the linguistic and narratological analysis, with computational tools, of the historical novelI promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni,the collaborative creation of an anthology of Italian literature, which is named Antolo-gia 2.0.∗ This work was partially supported by Provincia Autonoma di Trento.© Andrea Bolioli, Matteo Casu, Maurizio Lana, and Renato Roda;licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BYWorkshop on Computational Models of Narrative 2013.Editors: Mark A. Finlayson, Bernhard Fisseni, Benedikt Löwe, and Jan Christoph Meister; pp. 30–35OpenAccess Series in InformaticsSchloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl Publishing, GermanyA. Bolioli, M. Casu, M. Lana, and R. Roda 31This paper focuses on the first issue. Students and teachers experimented with newways to learn linguistic and digital skills, by using a collaborative learning environment1built around the novel I Promessi Sposi. This educational application can be considered anexample of “semantic mashup” for narrative, a discovering method which is gaining attentionand it is considered attractive by general users (see for example http://lotrproject.com)as well as a good training camp by researchers. In agreement with Inderjeet Mani, we believe“that computational narratology has the potential to revolutionize the way we create andstudy literature” [6].The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly describes thePromessi Sposi learning environment. Section 3 presents the basic ontology underlying thesystem. Section 4 describes the social networks of narrative interactions created and used inthe environment.2 The learning environment as a semantic mashupI promessi sposi is a very important Italian novel written by Alessandro Manzoni andpublished in its final illustrated version in 1840. For many and various reasons it wasrecognized as a work representing the cultural and linguistic unity of Italy and rapidlybecame a book read and studied in the secondary high school. Today it constitutes a difficultmatter of study for students because of the growing distance from its themes, matter, andlinguistic flavor (nineteenth century vocabulary and syntax).The work can be – in a typical postmodern way – rebuilt while keeping it intact. Thishas been done by making it the center of a universe of relation, tools and activities.Relations: around the work relations are built first of all among schools whose studentswork on the text, among schools and SMEs, and among schools and territorial institutions.Tools: we built a set of tools allowing the students to browse the text following charactersin theirs wanderings, to pay attention to a specific place in order to look at passing bycharacters, to explore the text by means of social network graphs, and so on.Activities: in addition to “exploration” activities, students can link self-made reports,photographs, images (such as the drawings by Francesco Gonin), other texts, bibliographicreferences to the appropriate passages.The basis for this rebuilding of the work has been the annotation of the novel for entitymentions and narrative sequences. We annotated a version of Promessi sposi [7] for Entitymentions of type Person (characters) and Location using two NER tools (TextPro by FBK-HLT and Sophia Semantic Engine by CELI). The automatic annotation were manuallycorrected. The novel has been split into sequences, that is the basic narrative units studiedin high schools, (chunks of text) concerning a specific action or place or character. Dialogs,being the object of a specific interest, constitute always distinct sequences. Given this criteria,this operation has been done by humans.2What actually happens is that students can browse the novel following characters orsearching for places, can find the sequences pertaining to their interest, can read them, canpublish content related to a specific sequence or to a block of sequences linking it to them,can study graphs showing relations between characters based on their co-presence in thesame place or on their being part of a same dialogue.1 http://seduco.cross-library.com/promessisposi/2 A portion of the resulting dataset will be available to the research community.CMN 201332 Exploring the Betrothed LoversEven technical institute students, with a few literary interests, have enjoyed the noveland they succeeded in performing linguistic and narrative analysis that would not have beenpossible in a traditional frontal lesson based solely on the paper book.3 Ontological modelling of I Promessi SposiAn interactive application with such a rich set of contents has faced the task of finding agood balance between exploiting all the information (acquired via automated or manualannotation) and avoid its explosion in terms of conceptual complexity.Our treatment of I Promessi Sposi contains different sets of entities, which are linkedby means of relations: the novel itself, discourse elements (Chapters, Paragraphs, Textualchunks), narrative elements (Sequences, Agents and Locations).As for the novel, we considered the FRBR (Functional Requirements for BibliographicRecords) model [5], which distinguishes between the abstract Work from its Expressions(e.g., different revisions by the author) and its Manifestations.Discourse elements, such as chapters and paragraphs, are defined by the author, and –given a certain edition – they are fixed. Ontologically, in order to treat this subset of entities,we reused classes from DoCO, from the SPAR (Semantic Publishing And Referencing) set ofontologies [9].Narrative elements are the most interesting in this learning environment. We defined ourown subclasses for a sequence: signally, Narrative (including Dialogues and Monologues),Descriptive and Reflexive kinds of sequences. Sequences are in many-to-many relation withparagraphs. A narrative sequences is linked to a location (the place of the narrative unit), tocharacters which act in it, and possibly to speakers, which are not necessarily the same.Characters are, for the most part, persons or group of persons. A relevant exception isplayed by the Divine Providence, which can be considered as an agent in Manzoni’s work.For these reasons we adopt the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) vocabulary [3], which providesthe class foaf:Agent with subclasses foaf:Person and foaf:Group, with the propertyfoaf:member to link a group (such as the bravi, in our case) to its members.The notion of character is not a class in our model, because we interpret it as a roleplayed by an agent in a work. For this reason we modelled character as an OWL objectproperty between a foaf:Agent and a frbr:Work.Places and locations play a particular role in the model, for they can be regions, muni-cipalities (such as Milan, Lecco) as well as relative locations (e.g., Lucia’s house). Anothergeographic information in the novel is given by journeys between locations. In order tostructure places – e.g., declaring that Lucia’s house is in Lecco – we reuse the parentFeatureproperty from the GeoNames ontology [10]. Another aspect about the places deals with thechanging of places in time: some historical places do not exist anymore, have changed nameor have changed status (e.g., the home of Lucia was in Acquate, formerly a municipality, nowa neighborhood in Lecco). Again, we use the GeoNames ontology when possible and customproperties when necessary. In the context of the application these aspects are related to twomaps depicting the places of the novel: namely, a XVIIth century map of northern Italy, andthe current Google map.4 SNA in I Promessi SposiIn narratology, SNA (Social Network Analysis) has been used mostly as a new instrumentfor the study of plot evolution. By the extraction of the interactional networks of charactersA. Bolioli, M. Casu, M. Lana, and R. Roda 33from narrative works and the subsequent synthesis of the obtained data in network graphs itis possible to open a whole new perspectives to better comprehend the dynamics and thestructure of a narrative plot. Even excluding the numerous quantitative analysis optionsavailable, the mere rearrangement of the narration from the written context to a fairly clearand understandable display – where the whole plot is summarized in a single eidetic structure– represents a powerful explanatory enhancement [8]. This SNA analytical approach hasalready been employed with a fairly large selection of different literary text, ranging fromShakespeare’s tragedies [8] to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland[1], including the wholeMarvel comics universe [2].However, the vast heuristic potential of quantitative network analysis methods has rarelybeen employed for studying a text as structured and as complex as I Promessi Sposi is. Inaddition, it is the first time it is used in an educational context (high schools), as far as weknow. The composite narration of Alessandro Manzoni’s most famous work comprises plentifulflashbacks, historical and ethical excursuses, changes in the main narration perspective.Such narrative complexity challenges the heuristic potential of SNA techniques: theavailable methodologies must be carefully selected and polished to obtain the most effectiveanalytical tool. While the identification of the network’s “nodes” with the characters ofthe studied texts is a choice common to the absolute majorities of literary researches thatemployed network analysis methodologies, the definition of “edges” appears less immediateand more difficult. One option, in such sense, focuses on “conversational edges” [4], where anedge is formed between two characters/nodes every time the studied text features an explicitdialogue between aforementioned characters.The graph in Figure 1 represents the complete conversational network of I PromessiSposi, elaborated with the SNA visualization software Gephi. The dimension of each node isdue to the number of conversational interactions (“degree” in SNA terminology) in whichthat node’s character is involved: in fact the largest node, in the very middle of the graph,embodies Renzo Tramaglino, the me lead of the novel. The thickness of each “edge” is directlycorrelated to the number of interactions between the relative couple of nodes: if a dyad ofcharacters shares many dialogues, the edge that tie their node will be more thick. Differentcolors distinguish each community of characters (that is a set of highly interconnected nodes).Remarkably, the community optimization algorithm perfectly recognizes the various“narrative blocks” of characters interactions: for example, the group of green nodes at theleft of Renzo, quite isolated from the rest of the network, identifies one of the novel’s mostfamous flashbacks, centered on the origin of Gertrude’s character.Alongside the “conversational network”, we have also extracted a second network from IPromessi Sposi: while the nodes still represent the main characters of the novel, this timean edge between two characters identify their co-occurrence in the same narrative sequence.The graph in Figure 2 illustrates this second action-oriented network. As it is possible tonotice even at a first glance, while the general structure of the two networks is similar, thereare few interesting differences: for example, in the second graph the node Lucia Mondella,the main female character, has a slightly larger degree than the one of Renzo, and achievethe status of larger hub of the graph. This is particularly interesting since the main plot ofthe book splits very soon into 2 separate narrative lines, one for each of the titular betrothedlover. According to our graphs, role of Lucia is more action-oriented while the one of Renzomore involved in conversational interactions.The twofold SNA approach used, however, revealed not to be only a valuable visualiza-tion/summarizing education tool, but also a powerful instrument per a deeper explorationof the text’s narrative structure and characters dynamics. With results that sometimes goCMN 201334 Exploring the Betrothed Loversbeyond the mere teaching/learning scope that is the main focus of our project. In fact,thanks to the quantitative metrics obtained from the two characters network, it was evenpossible to open new perspective of narrative analysis and to discover aspects unknown (andunexpected) even to our team’s experts in the work of Alessandro Manzoni. For example,while investigating on the relational “importance” of each character in the novel throughthe evaluation of betweenness centrality (a measure of brokerage centrality, that is the valueof a node as bridge between other nodes in a given network), we were surprised to find outthat some characters considered moderately secondary have an higher value than some ofthe main actors of the plot. Figures like “il Griso” – the main antagonist’s sidekick – andeven more “Agnese” – Lucia’s mother – play a way stronger bridging role in the relationalbalance than stronger narrative characters like the charismatic villain (then reformed helper)“Innominato” or the iconic “Don Abbondio”. This is just one example of the many analyticexploration perspectives opened by the SNA approach, perspectives than can be investigatedby both students and the researchers, taking advantage of the nature of versatile researchtool – and not only passive visualization solution – of the network graph.Acknowledgements. We want to thank CELI srl, Giampaolo Mazzini, Vittorio Di Tomasoand Bernardo Magnini, without whom this project would not have been possible; LorenzaRomano, Riccardo Tasso, Veronica Schelini, Sara Tonelli and two anonymous reviewers forproviding useful comments and help.References1 Apoorv Agarwal, Augusto Corvalan, Jacob Jensen, and Owen Rambow. Social networkanalysis of Alice in Wonderland. In Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT 2012 Workshop onComputational Linguistics for Literature, pages 88–96. Association for Computational Lin-guistics, 2012.2 Ricardo Alberich, Joe Miro-Julia, and Francesc Rosselló. Marvel universe looks almost likea real social network. Preprint, 2002.3 Dan Brickley and Libby Miller. The Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) vocabulary specification,2007. http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/.4 David K. Elson, Nichoas Dames, and Kathleen McKeown. Extracting social networks fromliterary fiction. In Jan Hajič, Sandra Carberry, Stephen Clark, and Joakim Nivre, editors,Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics,pages 138–147, Stroudsburg, PA, 2010. Association for Computational Linguistics.5 IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Functionalrequirements for bibliographic records: final report, 1997. As amended and correctedthrough February 2009.6 Inderjeet Mani. Computational Modeling of Narrative. Number 5 in Synthesis Lectures onHuman Language Technologies. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2012.7 Angelo Marchese, editor. Alessandro Manzoni: I Promessi Sposi. Arnoldo MondadoriEditore, 1985.8 Franco Moretti. Network theory, plot analysis. New Left Review, 68:80–102, 2011.9 David Shotton and Silvio Peroni. DoCO, the document components ontology, 2011. http://purl.org/spar/doco.10 Bernard Vatant. GeoNames Ontology – Semantic Web. http://www.geonames.org/ontology/.A. Bolioli, M. Casu, M. Lana, and R. Roda 35A Character NetworksIDWWRUHVVDRVWHRVWHULDGHOYLOODJJLRXQDELWDQWH$]]HFFDJDUEXJOLFRQWH$WWLOLRRVWHVVDXQVHUYLWRUHSDGUHJXDUGLDQRXQJDEHOOLHUHGRQ$EERQGLREDUFDLRORVLJQRUPDUFKHVHFXUDWRGHOSDHVHIDPLJOLDGHOVDUWRODYHGRYDODEXRQDGRQQDEDGHVVDSHVFDWRUHVHUYLWRUL%HWWLQDSULQFLSHDLXWDQWHGLFDPHUDGHOFDUGLQDO)HGHULJR%RUURPHR3HUSHWXDXQFDSSXFFLQRJHQWHGRQQD3UDVVHGHEUDYLERUWYLFDULRGLSURYYLVLRQHPRQDWWL/XFLDSDGUHSURYLQFLDOHRVWHRVWHULDGL*RUJRQ]RODGRQ5RGULJRFRQYHUVDIUD)D]LRFDSELUULXQFRPPLVVDULRDPLFRGL5HQ]RIUD*DOGLQRSULQFLSLQRXQXRPRSRGHVWj$PEURJLR)XVHOOD$PEURJLRXQPRQDWWRJHQWLOXRPRFDSLWDQRGLJLXVWL]LD5HQ]RDELWDQWLFDUGLQDO)HGHULJR%RUURPHRIUDWHOORGHOOXFFLVRSDGUH9LWWRUH*HUYDVRSULQFLSHVVD*HUWUXGHEDURFFLDLRSDGUH&ULVWRIRUR1LEELRPHUFDQWHGL0LODQRQRWDLRFULPLQDOH$QWRQLR)HUUHUSDUHQWLGHOODPRQDFDGL0RQ]D$JQHVHFRQWH]LRGRQ)HUUDQWH3HGURXQDFDPHULHUDFRQVROHVROGDWLRVWHSDGUHJXDUGLDQRGHOFRQYHQWRXRPLQL7RQLR0HQLFRSDUHQWLGL7RQLRXQDVHUYD%RUWROR&DVWDJQHULLQQRPLQDWRYHFFKLRVHUYLWRUHYLFDULRGHOOHPRQDFKHSDGUH)HOLFH&DVDWL*ULVRVDUWRXQSUHWHFigure 1 Conversational network.GRQ5RGULJR$]]HFFDJDUEXJOLGRQQD3UDVVHGH0HQLFR3HUSHWXDGRQ$EERQGLRIUD*DOGLQRFRQWH]LR$JQHVH(JLGLR&HFLOLD1LEELRFDUGLQDO)HGHULJR%RUURPHRGRQ)HUUDQWH7RQLR%RUWRORSDGUHJXDUGLDQRSDGUH&ULVWRIRUR/RGRYLFR6HWWDOD5HQ]R7UDPDJOLQR*HUWUXGH*ULVRFRQWH$WWLOLR LQQRPLQDWR/XFLD0RQGHOODSDGUH%RQDYHQWXUDGRQ*RQ]DORFigure 2 Co-occurrence in narrative sequences network.CMN 2013

Exploring the Betrothed Lovers

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Exploring the Betrothed Lovers

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