A Narratology-Based Framework for Storyline Extraction

Stories are a pervasive phenomenon of human life. They also represent a cognitive tool to understand and make sense of the world and of its happenings. In this contribution we describe a narratology-based framework for modeling stories as a combination of different data structures and to automatically extract them from news articles. We introduce a distinction among three data structures (timelines, causelines, and storylines) that capture different narratological dimensions, respectively chronological ordering, causal connections, and plot structure. We developed the Circumstantial Event Ontology (CEO) for modeling (implicit) circumstantial relations as well as explicit causal relations and create two benchmark corpora: ECB+/CEO, for causelines, and the Event Storyline Corpus (ESC), for storylines. To test our framework and the difficulty in automatically extract causelines and storylines, we develop a series of reasonable baseline systems