Modeling and Mining Narratives with Data-Driven Semantic Networks

Date: Thursday, April 13
Time: 11:00am-12:00pm
Location: CS Conference Room (Mudd)
Speaker:Dave Elson
Abstract: In this talk I will give an outline of my doctoral research, which is now in its early stages. I will motivate and define the problem of modeling narratives as semantic networks, with particular emphasis on capturing notions of creativity, reducing dependence on knowledge and mimicking the human narrative instinct. Touching on prior work, I will propose processes by which an "expectation model" for narratives will be statistically learned from common patterns discovered among training narratives, and discuss the utility of such a model. Finally, I will outline the progress I have made, including a specific model I am using to model a subset of Aesop's Fables, as well as the toolkit I have developed for implementing it.