Reading Narratives

Learning Hierarchical Plans by Reading Simple English Narratives

We describe an approach for learning a rich plan representation from a parallel corpus of commonsense narratives. Each narrative is an ordered natural language description of the steps required to accomplish common domestic tasks, including “get the mail” and “make a bed”, and there are tens to hundreds of differently written narratives for each task. With the goal of learning a single rich pla...

Cultural Differences in Narratives and Reading Achievement in African American Children

When Commodities Attack: Reading Narratives of the Great Recession and Late Capitalism in Contemporary Horror Films

This paper examines recent horror films in the US in relationship to the economic collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession. Using Rubber (2010) and Iron Invader (2011), it explores how the “killer commodity” resonates with working-class anxieties of dispossession and disposability, especially in the auto industries of the places where the films are set and produced: the US and France. The films...

Illness Identities and Biological Citizenship: Reading the Illness Narratives of Hepatitis C Patients

A growing number of social scientists are asking important questions about the dawning of a new kind of citizenship – biological citizenship – and its implications for how we understand the relationship between the state and civil society actors. The perspective of biological citizenship can be expanded to include the emergence of illness as a new political cleavage, as an identity through whic...

Summarizing Narratives

Most research on na r ra t i ve tex t summarisation has been conducted w i t h i n the paradigm of experimental psychology. But recent language processing research i n a r t i f i c i a l i n t e l l i g e n c e suggests that the predominant theory of tex t summarisation requi res fu r the r examinat ion. Seemingly minor s t r u c t u r a l mod i f i ca t ions of a s tory can reau l t in a i g ...