Joshua Reiss


2023

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Identifying Visual Depictions of Animate Entities in Narrative Comics: An Annotation Study
Lauren Edlin | Joshua Reiss
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Narrative Understanding

Animate entities in narrative comics stories are expressed through a number of visual representations across panels. Identifying these entities is necessary for recognizing characters and analysing narrative affordances unique to comics, and integrating these with linguistic reference annotation, however an annotation process for animate entity identification has not received adequate attention. This research explores methods for identifying animate entities visually in comics using annotation experiments. Two rounds of inter-annotator agreement experiments are run: the first asks annotators to outline areas on comic pages using a Polygon segmentation tool, and the second prompts annotators to assign each outlined entity’s animacy type to derive a quantitative measure of agreement. The first experiment results show that Polygon-based outlines successfully produce a qualitative measure of agreement; the second experiment supports that animacy status is best conceptualised as a graded, rather than binary, concept.

2017

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Constructing narrative using a generative model and continuous action policies
Emmanouil Theofanis Chourdakis | Joshua Reiss
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation (CC-NLG 2017)