Computational Models of Narrative
May 26‐27, 2012
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre Istanbul, Turkey to be co‐located with the LREC’2012, the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Second CALL FOR PAPERS

Paper submission deadline: February 24, 2012

Workshop Aims
Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear that, to truly understand and explain human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why narrative is universal and explain (or explain away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop (and its predecessors) is to address key, fundamental questions about narrative that advance our fundamental understanding of narrative and our ability model it computationally.
Special Focus: Shared Resources
In addition to fundamental questions, the field has yet to address key needs with regard to shared resources and corpora that could smooth and hasten the way forward. The vast majority of work on narrative uses fewer than four stories to perform their experiments, and rarely re‐use narratives from previous studies. Because NLP technology cannot yet take us all the way to the
highly‐accurate formal representations of language semantics, this implies significant amounts of repeated work in annotation. The way forward could be catalyzed by a carefully constructed set of shared resources. This meeting will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative. Moreover, the meeting will have a special focus on the identification, collection, and construction of shared resources and corpora that facilitate the computational modeling of narrative. Papers should focus on issues fundamental to computational modeling and scientific understanding, or issues related to building shared resources to advance the field. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not discouraged, but is not required.

Illustrative Topics and Questions

• What kinds of shared resources are required for the computational study of narrative?
• What content and modalities should be put in a “Story Bank”? What formal representations should be used?
• What shared resources are available, or how can already‐extant resources be adapted to common needs?
• What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts? What is special that makes something a narrative?
• What are the details of the relationship between narrative and common sense?
• How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a 'universal' scheme for encoding episodes?
• What impact do the purpose, function, and genre of a narrative have on its form and content?
• What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? How many possible story lines are there?
• Are there systematic differences in the formal properties of narratives from different cultures?
• What are appropriate representations for narrative? What representations underlie the extraction of narrative schemas?
• How should we evaluate computational models of narrative?

Organizing Committee
Mark A. Finlayson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Deniz Yuret, Koc University, Turkey
Floris Bex, University of Dundee, Scotland

Sponsors
There will be a number of travel grants available to workshop authors via our sponsors:

• ONR Global
• Office of Naval Research
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Contact
narrative‐ws12@csail.mit.edu
http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/ws12

Note: Workshop dates have changed slightly since the first call