SIGdial 2017

18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Modelling Protagonist Goals and Desires in First-Person Narrative

Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Jiaqi Wu, Ruimin Wang, Pranav Anand and Marilyn Walker

Many genres of natural language text are narratively structured, a testament to our predilection for organizing our experiences as narratives. There is broad consensus that understanding a narrative requires identifying and tracking the goals and desires of the characters and their narrative outcomes. However, to date, there has been limited work on computational models for this problem. We introduce a new dataset, DesireDB, which includes goldstandard labels for identifying statements of desire, textual evidence for desire ful- fillment, and annotations for whether the stated desire is fulfilled given the evidence in the narrative context. We report experiments on tracking desire fulfillment using different methods, and show that LSTM Skip-Thought model achieves F-measure of 0.7 on our corpus.