A Paradigm for Eliciting Story Variation

The understanding of story variation, whether motivated by cultural currents or other factors, is important for applications of formal models of narrative such as story generation or story retrieval. We present the first stage of an experiment to elicit natural narrative variation data suitable for evaluation with respect to story similarity, to qualitative and quantitative analysis of story variation, and also for data processing. We also present few preliminary results from the first stage of the experiment, using Red Riding Hood and Romeo and Juliet as base texts. 1998 ACM Subject Classification H.1.m Models and Principles: Miscellaneous, H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing, J.5 Arts and Humanities, I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods