Script knowledge plays a central role in text understanding and is relevant for a variety of downstream tasks. In this paper, we consider two recent datasets which provide a rich and general representation of script events in terms of paraphrase sets. We introduce the task of mapping event mentions in narrative texts to such script event types, and present a model for this task that exploits ri...

This paper presents the InScript corpus (Narrative Texts Instantiating Script structure). InScript is a corpus of 1,000 stories centered around 10 different scenarios. Verbs and noun phrases are annotated with event and participant types, respectively. Additionally, the text is annotated with coreference information. The corpus shows rich lexical variation and will serve as a unique resource fo...

Recent research in reading comprehension supports the hypothesis that readers are aided by textual cohesion. Traditional readability formulas are not able to effectively assess levels of textual cohesion, nor do they account for potential comprehension obstacles caused by differences in genre. This research employs the computational tool, CohMetrix, to assess distributions of both cohesion and ...

Natural language generation systems to date have concentrated on the tasks of explanation generation, tutorial dialogue, automated software documentation, and similar technical tasks. A largely unexplored area is narrative prose generation, or the production of texts used in stories such as novels, mysteries, and fairy tales. We present a feature analysis of one complex area of NLG found in nar...

For young children, adults learning English, or individuals with language disorders, complex narratives are difficult to create and understand. While narratives can easily be assessed in terms of their lexical and syntactic difficulty, automatically measuring the level of narrative complexity is a challenging problem. We present and evaluate a preliminary system for assessing narrative complexi...

BACKGROUND Research on the presentation of information in narrative versus expository text genres is inconclusive with respect to the question of which is more beneficial for student learning. AIMS We examine the effect of presenting factual content in either narrative or expository genres on student learning. We also consider relevant prior knowledge and working memory capacity (WMC) as pote...

This study investigates the use of relative clauses in French children's narrative monologues. Narrative texts were collected from French-speaking monolinguals in four age groups (five, seven, ten years and adults). Twenty subjects from each group were asked to tell a story based on a picture book consisting of twenty-four images without text (Frog, Where are you?). Relative constructions were ...

We would like to build story understanding systems which are transparent, modular, and extensible. To this end, we have been working on a new logical approach to narrative understanding that features a GPSG-style grammar and an episodic logic with probabilistic inference rules. The grammar represents phrase structure and the relationship between phrase structure and logical form in a modular, e...

There has been a widespread appeal for the inclusion of more informational text in elementary reading programs and instruction. This appeal is motivated by claims that children's early reading material is dominated by narrative texts and by recognition of the importance of learning to read other types of text. Commercial reading programs provide a significant source of material used in reading ...