Narrative in Short German Prose: A Multi-Phenomenon Dataset for Computational Literary Analysis

Hans Ole Hatzel, Haimo Stiemer, Evelyn Gius, Chris Biemann


Abstract
We present the novel dataset GermAnProse, an annotated corpus consisting of four German short prose texts accompanied by an extensive set of narrative-focused annotations.As part of this dataset, we contribute an annotation scheme for mentions, speech, and character agency: Characters in Action (ChiA).GermAnProse also contains information on narrative phenomena: narrativity, semantic verb classes, and plot keyness.Moreover, we include reader reception data in the form of timing information for audiobook performances, indicating pauses between sentences and the time taken to read a specific sentence in a performance.We release the dataset, which contains more than 18,000 manually created standoff annotations in JSON format, enabling researchers to utilize this resource for further exploratory applications.
Anthology ID:
2026.latechclfl-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Diego Alves, Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Janis Pagel, Stan Szpakowicz
Venues:
LaTeCH-CLfL | WS
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
257–265
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.latechclfl-1.25/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Hans Ole Hatzel, Haimo Stiemer, Evelyn Gius, and Chris Biemann. 2026. Narrative in Short German Prose: A Multi-Phenomenon Dataset for Computational Literary Analysis. In Proceedings of the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026, pages 257–265, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Narrative in Short German Prose: A Multi-Phenomenon Dataset for Computational Literary Analysis (Hatzel et al., LaTeCH-CLfL 2026)
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 2026.latechclfl-1.25.SupplementaryMaterial.txt
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 2026.latechclfl-1.25.SupplementaryMaterial.zip