The increased use of large corpora in narrative research has created new opportunities for empirical research and intelligent narrative technologies. To best exploit the value of these corpora, several research groups are eschewing complex discourse analysis techniques in favor of high-level minimalist narrative annotation schemes that can be quickly applied, achieve high inter-rater agreement, and are amenable to automation using machine-learning techniques. In this paper we compare different annotation schemes that have been employed by two groups of researchers to annotate large corpora of narrative text. Using a dual-annotation methodology, we investigate the correlation between narrative clauses distinguished by their structural role (orientation, action, evaluation), their subjectivity, and their narrative level within the discourse. We find that each simple narrative annotation scheme captures a structurally distinct characteristic of real-world narratives, and each combination of labels is evident in a corpus of 19 weblog narratives (951 narrative clauses). We discuss several potential applications of minimalist narrative annotation schemes, noting the combination of label across these two annotation schemes that best support each task.

Linear logic programming languages have been identified in prior work as viable for specifying stories and analyzing their causal structure. We investigate the use of such a language for specifying story worlds, or settings where generalized narrative actions have uniform effects (not specific to a particular set of characters or setting elements), which may create emergent behavior through feedback loops. We show a sizable example of a story world specified in the language Celf and discuss its interpretation as a story-generating program, a simulation, and an interactive narrative. Further, we show that the causal analysis tools available by virtue of using a proof-theoretic language for specification can assist the author in reasoning about the structure and consequences of emergent stories.

This article describes the process of designing a point-and-click adventure game that aimed at using dream logic as the basis to create its narrative puzzles. The technical solution to tackle this challenge was using Procedural Content Generation (PCG) as the design approach, which was used expressively to recreate the instability and changeability of dreams. Although PCG brought about replayability to the game, called Symon, it also created a series of other development problems, which had to be remedied through other design devices. One of the lessons learned during the development of the game is that PCG is not a blanket solution to problems, but rather an expressive tool to be used in combination to other design strategies; human factors are also key both during the development and reception of narrative video games.

As a story unfolds, it constructs a depiction of events, and at the same time, it also builds conceptual structure at a higher, interpretive level. This higher-level structure provides the terms for understanding the unfolding story, indicating what kinds of features and consequences characterize it – a story ontology . The process by which a tale constructs a story ontology is not straightforward, and in many ways is just as complex as the action at the event level. It involves an interaction between inferred situations and contexts, each with their own networks of terms and structures, which jostle for dominance. I refer to this interaction as governance . In this work, I demonstrate an example of governance at both levels, using a scene from the series Game of Thrones . When the interpretive terms of a story emerge, an understanding of what kinds of events might come next – the possible causal implications – are also conveyed, even if they are unexpected.

Humans imagine things. We live our lives in great measure by imagining circumstances a bit different from what we find, and then (again using imagination) we explore what it might take to bring those circumstances about, or what it might be like to live in such circumstances. We do this regarding issues large and small, all day long, every day. It is how we operate, and it gives us a huge leg up in detecting and repairing our own confusion as we negotiate this complex dynamic world. It is also quite different from how our artificial systems operate.

In this paper we address the task of extracting risk events and probabilities from free text, focusing in particular on the biomedical domain. While our initial motivation is to enable the determination of the parameters of a Bayesian belief network, our approach is not specific to that use case. We are the first to investigate this task as a sequence tagging problem where we label spans of text as events A or B that are then used to construct probability statements of the form P(A|B)=x. We show that our approach significantly outperforms an entity extraction baseline on a new annotated medical risk event corpus. We also explore semi-supervised methods that lead to modest improvement, encouraging further work in this direction.

In this paper, we focus on the problem of extracting structured labeled data from short unstructured ad-postings from online sources like Craigslist, where ads are posted on various topics, such as job postings, rentals, car sales etc. A fundamental challenge in addressing this problem is that most ad-postings are highly unstructured, short-text postings written in an informal manner with no inherent grammar or well-defined dictionary. In this paper, we propose unsupervised and supervised algorithms for extracting structured data from unstructured ads in the form of (key, value) pairs where the keys naturally represent topic-specific features in the ads. The unsupervised algorithm is centered around building an affinity graph, using the words from a topic-specific corpus of such ads where the edge weights represent affinities between words; the (key, value) extraction algorithm identifies specific groups of words in the affinity graph corresponding to different classes of key attributes. The supervised algorithm uses a Conditional Random Field based training algorithm to identify specific structured (key, value) pairs based on pre-defined topic-specific structural data representations of ads. Based on a corpus of car and apartment ad-postings from Craigslist, the unsupervised algorithm reported an accuracy of 67.74% and 68.74% for car and apartment ads respectively. The supervised algorithm demonstrated an improved performance with accuracies of 74.07% and 72.59% respectively.

Wikipedia provides an enormous amount of background knowledge to reason about the semantic relatedness between two entities. We propose Wikipedia-based Distributional Semantics for Entity Relatedness (DiSER), which represents the semantics of an entity by its distribution in the high dimensional concept space derived from Wikipedia. DiSER measures the semantic relatedness between two entities by quantifying the distance between the corresponding high-dimensional vectors. DiSER builds the model by taking the annotated entities only, therefore it improves over existing approaches, which do not distinguish between an entity and its surface form. We evaluate the approach on a benchmark that contains the relative entity relatedness scores for 420 entity pairs. Our approach improves the accuracy by 12% on state of the art methods for computing entity relatedness. We also show an evaluation of DiSER in the Entity Disambiguation task on a dataset of 50 sentences with highly ambiguous entity mentions. It shows an improvement of 10% in precision over the best performing methods. In order to provide the resource that can be used to find out all the related entities for a given entity, a graph is constructed, where the nodes represent Wikipedia entities and the relatedness scores are reflected by the edges. Wikipedia contains more than 4.1 millions entities, which required efficient computation of the relatedness scores between the corresponding 17 trillions of entity-pairs.

Hershman and Lieb, 1988) However, Ward et al. (Ward et al. 1999) have convincingly argued an alternative While it is relatively easy to recognize a creative deed, it is view that "[…] creative capacity is an essential property of extremely difficult (as demonstrated by creativity research normative human cognition and […] the relevant processes so far) to define what creativity is. The past (almost 70) are open to investigation". In support of this view, I would years of research definitely shed some light on different like to mention the research of Picciuto and Carruthers aspects of creativity, but we are still far from a commonly (Picciuto and Carruthers, 2012) that put forward the agreed upon definition of it and consequently a deep hypothesis that pretense play might be the key factor in understanding of this phenomenon. For an extended understanding creativity. Pretense play occurs typically in historical overview of creativity research, please refer to children at about the age of 18 months and is universal (Stojanov, 2013). Here are four branches which can be across all human cultures.

The need for health providers to share information is a pressing need in our ever more connected world. A patient's health information should seamlessly flow from labs to hospitals to primary care offices. To address this need, in this paper we present the Health E-Match, which focuses on the matching health terms in support of semantic interoperability. Health E-Match determines the semantic similarity between data items, realizing, for instance, that "BHGC (UR)" and "BETA-HCG (QUAL)" both refer to the same pregnancy test, known as "Beta human chorionic gonadotropin, urine qualitative." Our approach is grounded in probabilistic machine learning, and leverages several sophisticated methods for comparing the similarity between medical data items beyond simple edit distance. We present two large scale, real-world experiments to verify that our approach is both accurate and has the ability to eventually be "universal" in that models trained on one set of data translate to strong performance on data from a completely different provider.