Branching Narratives: Character Decision Points Detection

Alexey Tikhonov


Abstract
This paper presents the Character Decision Points Detection (CHADPOD) task, a task of identification of points within narratives where characters make decisions that may significantly influence the story’s direction. We propose a novel dataset based on Choose Your Own Adventure (a registered trademark of Chooseco LLC) games graphs to be used as a benchmark for such a task. We provide a comparative analysis of different models’ performance on this task, including a couple of LLMs and several MLMs as baselines, achieving up to 89% accuracy. This underscores the complexity of narrative analysis, showing the challenges associated with understanding character-driven story dynamics. Additionally, we show how such a model can be applied to the existing text to produce linear segments divided by potential branching points, demonstrating the practical application of our findings in narrative analysis.
Anthology ID:
2024.games-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Games and Natural Language Processing @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Chris Madge, Jon Chamberlain, Karen Fort, Udo Kruschwitz, Stephanie Lukin
Venues:
games | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
70–75
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.games-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexey Tikhonov. 2024. Branching Narratives: Character Decision Points Detection. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Games and Natural Language Processing @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 70–75, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Branching Narratives: Character Decision Points Detection (Tikhonov, games-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2024.games-1.8.pdf