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Towards Automatic Narrative Coherence Prediction
2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI '21)
  • Filip Bendevski, New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Jumana Ibrahim, New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Tina Krulec, New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Theodore Waters, New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Nizar Habash, New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Hanan Salam, New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Himadri Mukherjee, New York University Abu Dhabi
  • Christin Camia, Zayed University
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
10-18-2021
Abstract

Research in Psychology has shown that stories people tell about themselves, and how they recall their experiences, reveal a lot about their individual characteristics and mental well-being. The Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme (NaCCS) is a set of guidelines established in psychology research for annotating the “coherence” of a narrative along three dimensions: context, chronology and theme. A significant correlation was found between a narrative’s coherence score and independently collected mental health markers of the narrator. Currently, all coherence annotations are done manually; a time consuming task which drains vital resources. In this paper, we propose an Artificial Intelligence based approach involving Natural Language Processing (NLP) to predict a narrative’s coherence score (4-class classification problem). We explore a number of techniques, ranging from traditional machine learning models such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) to pre-trained language models such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). BERT produced the best results for all dimensions in terms of accuracy: 53.7% (context), 71.8% (chronology), and 69.6% (theme). The location of information in the narratives (beginning, end, throughout) was helpful in improving predictions.

Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Disciplines
Keywords
  • NLP,
  • AI for mental health,
  • Machine Learning (ML),
  • Narrative text analysis,
  • Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme (NaCCS),
  • (Un)supervised learning,
  • Word embedding,
  • BERT
Scopus ID
85118970490
Indexed in Scopus
Yes
Open Access
No
https://doi.org/10.1145/3462244.3479895
Citation Information
Filip Bendevski, Jumana Ibrahim, Tina Krulec, Theodore Waters, et al.. "Towards Automatic Narrative Coherence Prediction" 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI '21) (2021)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/christin-camia/5/