Towards Finding the Fundamental Unit of Narrative: A Proposal for the Narreme

Verband action-based event representations have been the cornerstone of narrative representation. However, these suffer from a lack of specificity as to the level of abstraction being discussed. For example, a single verb-based event can be elaborated ad infinitum, generating arbitrarily many new verb-based events. In this position paper, we present a proposal for the fundamental unit of narrative, which we call the narreme. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we present the structure of the narreme, which encodes the state of the narrative, not the state of the world. Second, we present the ways narremes can be combined, which gives rise to the structure of the narrative itself. These combinations have special properties which account for the causal, temporal and intentional relationships between the events that make up a narrative. Lastly, we present an interpretation of common narrative tasks within the context of the narreme.