Abstract
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.- Anthology ID:
- W17-5540
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Saarbrücken, Germany
- Editors:
- Kristiina Jokinen, Manfred Stede, David DeVault, Annie Louis
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 342–351
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W17-5540
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W17-5540
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhichao Hu and Marilyn Walker. 2017. Inferring Narrative Causality between Event Pairs in Films. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 342–351, Saarbrücken, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Inferring Narrative Causality between Event Pairs in Films (Hu & Walker, SIGDIAL 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/W17-5540.pdf