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Chapter Ordering in Novels

  • Stony Brook University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Understanding narrative flow and text coherence in long-form documents (novels) remains an open problem in NLP. To gain insight, we explore the task of chapter ordering, reconstructing the original order of chapters in novel given a random permutation of the text. This can be seen as extending the well-known sentence ordering task to vastly larger documents: our task deals with over 9, 000 novels with an average of twenty chapters each, versus standard sentence ordering datasets averaging only 5-8 sentences. We formulate the task of reconstructing order as a constraint solving problem, using minimum feedback arc set and traveling salesman problem optimization criteria, where the weights of the graph are generated based on models for character occurrences and chapter boundary detection, using relational chapter scores derived from RoBERTa. Our best methods yield a Spearman correlation of 0.59 on this novel and challenging task, substantially above baseline.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022
EditorsYoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages3838-3848
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429401
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022 - Hybrid, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Duration: Dec 7 2022Dec 11 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022

Conference

Conference2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited Arab Emirates
CityHybrid, Abu Dhabi
Period12/7/2212/11/22

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