Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 1994 / Tracking Point of View in Narrative

Tracking Point of View in Narrative

Paper · 1994 · Janyce M. Wiebe

Summary

Third-person fiction mixes objective narration with passages that convey what a character thinks, perceives or feels. Wiebe frames this as the task of tracking psychological point of view. For each sentence, a reader must decide whether it is objective or subjective, and if subjective, which character it belongs to. This is hard because explicit cues such as "Dennys thought" are rare, so the answer usually depends on context. Wiebe studied published novels and short stories to find regular patterns in how authors shift and maintain point of view. She then turned these patterns into an implemented algorithm. It takes clause-level input, including the type of state of affairs described, and labels each sentence as objective or as subjective for a particular character. Preliminary tests on passages from novels showed low error rates. Getting point of view right matters for separating story facts from character beliefs, for attributing attitudes to the correct source, for plan recognition and for interpreting discourse relations.

Key points

  • The algorithm builds on Banfield's notions of subjective sentences and subjective elements. Its main targets are represented thoughts and perceptions and private-state reports. It also treats private-state actions such as sighing or looking, but excludes represented speech.
  • Each sentence is assigned a point-of-view operation: continuation, resumption, initiation or objective. The subjective character is identified for subjective sentences.
  • In the Lonesome Dove evaluation, the algorithm made 20 primary errors on 271 truly subjective sentences. Of these, 13 were labeled objective and 7 were assigned to the wrong character.
  • On 450 input items from The Magic of the Glits, there were 34 primary errors (8%) and 21 secondary errors (5%). Most stemmed from minor subjective contexts of a secondary character, Lynette.
  • Treating private-state actions as private states only after a "significant" earlier subjective context would cut these errors to 22 primary (5%) and 7 secondary (2%). This heuristic was proposed but not yet incorporated into the algorithm.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓New Mexico State UniversityLas Cruces · United States6 works · 5,598 citations

📚 Shelves 5 Computer Science · 9,086 works Artificial Intelligence · 8,889 works Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works Human-Computer Interaction · 61 works

Cite

Cite as Janyce M. Wiebe. 1994. Tracking Point of View in Narrative. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{wiebe1994tracking,
  title = {{Tracking Point of View in Narrative}},
  author = {Janyce M. Wiebe},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1994},
  doi = {10.5555/972525.972529},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5555/972525.972529}
}

References

76 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Allen, James F., and Perrault, C. Raymond (1980). "Analyzing intention in utterances." Artij~'cial Intelligence 15, 143-178. find
  2. Almeida, Michael J. (1987). "Reasoning about the temporal structure of narratives." Technical report 87-10, SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science. find
  3. Banfield, Ann (1982). Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Routledge & Kegan Paul. find
  4. Banfield, Ann (1987). "Describing the unobserved." In The Linguistics of Writing, edited by Nigel Fabb, 265-285. Methuen. find
  5. Barwise, Jon, and Perry, John (1983). Situations and Attitudes. MIT Press. find
  6. Brinton, Laurel (1980). "'Represented perception': A study in narrative style." Poetics 9, 363-381. find
  7. Bruder, Gail A., and Wiebe, Janyce M. (1990). "A psychological test of an algorithm for recognizing subjectivity in narrative text." In Proceedings, 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 947-952. find
  8. Bruder, Gail A., and Wiebe, Janyce M. (in press). "Recognizing subjectivity and identifying subjective characters in third-person fictional narrative." In Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, edited by Judy Duchan and Gail Bruder. Lawrence Erlbaum. find
  9. Bruder, Gail A.; Duchan, Judith F.; Rapaport, William J.; Segal, Erwin M.; Shapiro, Stuart C.; and Zubin, David A. (1986). "Deictic centers in narrative: An interdisciplinary cognitive-science project." Technical report 86-20, SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science. find
  10. Caenepeel, Mimo (1989). Aspect, temporal ordering, and perspective in narrative fiction. Doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh. find
  11. Carberry, Sandra (1989). "A pragmatics-based approach to ellipsis resolution." Computational Linguistics 15(2), 75-96. find
  12. Chafe, Wallace (1986). "Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing." In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, edited by Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols, 261-272. Ablex. find
  13. Chatman, Seymour (1978). Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press. find
  14. Chun, Soon Ae (1987). "SNePS implementation of possessive phrases." SNeRG technical note 19, SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science. find
  15. Cohen, Robin (1987). "Analyzing the structure of argumentative discourse." Computational Linguistics 13, 11-24. find
  16. Cohn, Dorrit (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Representing Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton University Press. find
  17. Computational Linguistics, Special Issue on Tense and Aspect. 1988, 14(2). find
  18. Computational Linguistics, Special Issue on User Modeling. 1988, 14(3). find
  19. Dole~el, Lubomir (1973). Narrative Modes in Czech Literature. University of Toronto Press. find
  20. Dyer, Michael G. (1983). In-Depth Understanding: A Computer Model of Integrated Processing for Narrative Comprehension. MIT Press. find
  21. Ehrlich, Susan (1987). "Aspect, foregrounding and point of view." Text 7(4), 363-376. find
  22. Ehrlich, Susan (1990). "Referential linking and the interpretation of tense." Journal of Pragmatics 14, 57-75. find
  23. Fauconnier, Gilles (1985). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. MIT Press. find
  24. Fillmore, Charles (1968). "The case for case." In Universals in Linguistic Theory, edited by E. Bach and R. T. Harms, 1-90. Holt. find
  25. Fillmore, Charles (1974). "Pragmatics and the description of discourse." In Berkeley Studies in Syntax and Semantics I, edited by Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, and Robin Lakoff, V1-V21. University of California Department of Linguistics and Institute of Human Learning. find
  26. Fillmore, Charles (1975). Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis. Indiana University Linguistics Club. find
  27. Galbraith, Mary (1990). Subjectivity in the Novel. Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY Buffalo Department of English. find
  28. Grosz, Barbara J., and Sidner, Candace L. (1986). "Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse." Computational Linguistics 12(3), 175-204. our card
  29. Grosz, Barbara J.; Joshi, Aravind K; and Weinstein, Scott (1983). "Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse." In Proceedings, 21st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 44-50. our card
  30. Hamburger, Kate (1973). The Logic of Literature, translated by M. J. Rose. Indiana University Press. find
  31. Hirst, Graeme (1987). Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity. Cambridge University Press. find
  32. Jespersen, Otto (1924). The Philosophy of Grammar. George Allen & Unwin. find
  33. Kuroda, S.-Y. (1973). "Where epistemology, style and grammar meet: A case study from the Japanese." In A Festschrift for Morris Halle, edited by P. Kiparsky and S. Anderson, 377-391. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. find
  34. Kuroda, S.-Y. (1976). "Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory — from a linguistic point of view." In Pragmatics of Language and Literature, edited by T. A. van Dijk, 107-140. North-Holland. find
  35. Li, Naicong (1987). "Pronoun resolution in SNePS." SNeRG technical note 18, SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science. find
  36. Li, Naicong (1991). Perspective-taking in Mandarin discourse. Doctoral dissertation, SUNY Buffalo. find
  37. Lyons, John (1977). Semantics, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press. find
  38. Nakhimovsky, Alexander (1988). "Aspect, aspectual class, and the temporal structure of narrative." Computational Linguistics 14(2), 29-43. find
  39. Nakhimovsky, Alexander, and Rapaport, William J. (1988). "Discontinuities in narratives." In Proceedings, 12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 465-470. find
  40. New York Times (16 Sept 1990). AIDS in Africa: A killer rages on, by Eric Eckholm. find
  41. Peters, Sandra L., and Shapiro, Stuart C. (1987a). "A representation for natural category systems." In Proceedings, 9th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 379-390. find
  42. Peters, Sandra L., and Shapiro, Stuart C. (1987b). "A representation for natural categorysystems." In Proceedings, lOth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 140-146. find
  43. Peters, Sandra L.; Shapiro, Stuart C.; and Rapaport, William J. (1988). "Flexible natural language processing and roschian category theory." In Proceedings, lOth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 125-131. find
  44. Quirk, Randolph; Greenbaum, Sidney; Leech, Geoffrey; and Svartvik, Jan (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. find
  45. Rapaport, William J. (1986). "Logical foundations for belief representation." Cognitive Science 10, 371-422. find
  46. Rapaport, William J.; Segal, Erwin M.; Shapiro, Stuart C.; Zubin, David A.; Bruder, Gail A.; Duchan, Judith E; Almeida, Michael J.; Daniels, Joyce H.; Galbraith, Mary; Wiebe, Janyce M.; and Yuhan, Albert H. (1989a). "Deictic centers and the cognitive structure of narrative comprehension." Technical… find
  47. Rapaport, William J.; Segal, Erwin M.; Shapiro, Stuart C.; Zubin, David A.; Bruder, Gail A.; Duchan, Judith F.; and Mark, David M. (1989b). "Cognitive and computer systems for understanding narrative text." Technical report 89-07, SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science. find
  48. Reichenbach, Hans (1947). Elements of Symbolic Logic. Macmillan. find
  49. Reichman, Rachel (1985). Getting Computers to Talk Like You and Me. MIT Press. find
  50. Reiser, Brian J. (1981). "Character tracking and the understanding of narratives. In Proceedings, 7th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. 209-211. find
  51. Shapiro, Stuart C. (1979). "The SNePS semantic network processing system." In Associative Networks, edited by N. V. Findler, 179-203. Academic. find
  52. Shapiro, Stuart C. (1982). "Generalized augmented transition network grammars for generation from semantic networks." American Journal of Computational Linguistics 8, 12-25. find
  53. Shapiro, Stuart C., and Rapaport, William J. (1987). "SNePS considered as a fully intensional propositional semantic network." In The Knowledge Frontier, edited by N. Cercone and G. McCalla, 262-315. Springer-Verlag. find
  54. Sidner, Candace L. (1983). "Focusing in the comprehension of definite anaphora." In Computational Models of Discourse, edited by Michael Brady and Robert Berwick, 267-330. MIT Press. find
  55. Stark, Heather A. (1987). Keeping track of characters in narrative. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, Stanford University. find
  56. Stark, Heather A. (1988). "What do paragraph markings do?" Discourse Processes 11, 275-303. find
  57. Uspensky, Boris (1973). A Poetics of Composition. University of California Press. find
  58. Webber, Bonnie L. (1983). "So what can we talk about now?" In Computational Models of Discourse, edited by Michael Brady and Robert Berwick, 331-371. MIT Press. find
  59. Wiebe, Janyce M. (1990). Recognizing subjective sentences: A computational investigation of narrative text. Doctoral dissertation, SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science. Also published as Technical report 90-03. find
  60. Wiebe, Janyce M. (1991). "References in narrative text." No~s (Special Issue on Cognitive Science and AI) 25(4), 457-486. find
  61. Wiebe, Janyce M., and Rapaport, William J. (1988). "A computational theory of perspective and reference in narrative." In Proceedings, 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 131-138. find
  62. Wilensky, Robert (1983). Planning and Understanding. Addison-Wesley. find
  63. Wilks, Yorick, and Bien, Janusz (1983). "Beliefs, points of view, and multiple environments." Cognitive Science 7, 95-119. find
  64. Texts Cited Adler, Carole S. (1987). The Magic of the Glits. Macmillan. find
  65. Bridgers, Sue Ellen (1979). All Together Now. Knopf. find
  66. Caldwell, Taylor (1966). No One Hears But Him. Doubleday. find
  67. Gibson, William (1988). Mona Lisa Overdrive. Bantam. find
  68. UEngle, Madeleine (1986). Many Waters. Dell Publishing. find
  69. Lorimer, Janet (1987). The Mystery of the Missing Treasure: Scholastic. find
  70. McMurtry, Larry (1985). Lonesome Dove. Simon & Schuster. find
  71. Oneal, Zibby (1971). War Work. Viking Press. find
  72. Sachs, Marilyn (1966). Amy and Laura. Doubleday. find
  73. Wootf, Virginia (1972). The Years. Hogarth Press. find
  74. Wu, William (1987). Cyborg. Ace Books. find
  75. A p p e n d i x A: T h e A l g o r i t h m A.1 Introduction The following aspects of the algorithm as it is presented in Wiebe (1990) are not addressed in this paper or included in the version of the algorithm given below. . find
  76. In addition to the state-of-affairs types listed in Section 6.3.1, there is an additional one, a s e e m i n g state. For example, "The m a n seemed tired to John" is about a seeming state. Such states are treated as private states. . The types of constituents, mentioned in Section 6.3.3, in which p… find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wiebe-1994-tracking-point-view-narrative/