Automatic classification of folk narrative genres

Folk narratives are a valuable resource for humanities and social science researchers. This paper focuses on automatically recognizing folk narrative genres, such as urban legends, fairy tales, jokes and riddles. We explore the effectiveness of lexical, structural, stylistic and domain specific features. We find that it is possible to obtain a good performance using only shallow features. As dataset for our experiments we used the Dutch Folktale database, containing narratives from the 16th century until now.