Canada

Despite recent advances of AI, story understanding remains an open and under-investigated problem. We collect, preprocess, and publicly release a video-language story dataset, Synopses of Movie Narratives(SyMoN), containing 5,193 video summaries of popular movies and TV series with a total length of 869 hours. SyMoN captures naturalistic storytelling videos made by human creators and intended for a human audience. 
As a prototypical and naturalistic story dataset, SyMoN features high coverage of multimodal story events. Its use of storytelling techniques cause cross-domain semantic gaps that provide appropriate challenges to existing models. We establish benchmarks on video-text retrieval and zero-shot alignment on movie summary videos, which showcase the importance of in-domain data and long-term memory in story understanding. With SyMoN, we hope to lay the groundwork for progress in multimodal story understanding.

ACL 2023

Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understanding

video memory

video story dataset

video-story understanding

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EMNLP 2024

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workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Positive emotion elicitation aims at evoking positive emotion states in human users in open-domain dialogue generation. However, most work focuses on inducing a single-dimension of positive sentiment using human annotated datasets, which limits the scale of the training dataset. In this paper, we propose to model various emotions in large unannotated conversations, such as joy, trust and anticipation, by leveraging a latent variable to control the emotional intention of the response. Our proposed emotion-eliciting-Conditional-Variational-AutoEncoder (EE-CVAE) model generates more diverse and emotionally-intelligent responses compared to single-dimension baseline models in human evaluation.

Eliciting Rich Positive Emotions in Dialogue Generation

Two studies tested the hypothesis that a Large Language Model (LLM) can be used to model psychological change following exposure to influential input. The first study tested a generic mode of influence - the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE) - where earlier exposure to a statement boosts a later truthfulness test rating. Analysis of newly collected data from human and LLM-simulated subjects (1000 of each) showed the same pattern of effects in both populations; although with greater per statement variability for the LLM. The second study concerns a specific mode of influence – populist framing of news to increase its persuasion and political mobilization. Newly collected data from simulated subjects was compared to previously published data from a 15 country experiment on 7286 human participants. Several effects from the human study were replicated by the simulated study, including ones that surprised the authors of the human study by contradicting their theoretical expectations; but some significant relationships found in human data were not present in the LLM data. Together the two studies support the view that LLMs have potential to act as models of the effect of influence.

Large Language Models respond to Influence like Humans

When harmful social stereotypes are expressed on a public platform, they must be addressed in a way that educates and informs both the original poster and other readers, without causing offence or perpetuating new stereotypes. In this paper, we synthesize findings from psychology and computer science to propose a set of potential counter-stereotype strategies. We then automatically generate such counter-stereotypes using ChatGPT, and analyze their correctness and expected effectiveness at reducing stereotypical associations. We identify the strategies of denouncing stereotypes, warning of consequences, and using an empathetic tone as three promising strategies to be further tested.

What Makes a Good Counter-Stereotype? Evaluating Strategies for Automated Responses to Stereotypical Text

Facilitating healthy online deliberation in terms of sensemaking and collaboration of discussion participants proves extremely challenging due to a number of known negative effects of online communication on social media platforms. We start from concerns and aspirations about the use of existing online discussion systems as distilled in previous literature, we then combine them with lessons learned on design and engineering practices from our research team, to inform the design of an easy-to-use tool (BCause.app) that enables higher quality discussions than traditional social media. We describe the design of this tool, highlighting the main interaction features that distinguish it from common social media, namely: i. the low-cost argumentation structuring of the conversations with direct replies; ii. and the distinctive use of reflective feedback rather than appreciative-only feedback. We then present the results of a controlled A/B experiment in which we show that the presence of argumentative and cognitive reflective discussion elements produces better social interaction with less polarization and promotes a more cohesive discussion than common social media-like interactions.

BCause: Reducing group bias and promoting cohesive discussion in online deliberation processes through a simple and engaging online deliberation tool

In this paper, we describe the problem of automatically evaluating quality of knowledge expressed in a non-fiction narrative text. We focus on a specific type of documents where each document describes a certain technical problem and its solution. The goal is not only to evaluate the quality of knowledge in such a document, but also to automatically suggest possible improvements to the writer so that a better knowledge-rich document is produced. We propose new evaluation metrics to evaluate quality of knowledge contents as well as flow of different types of sentences. The suggestions for improvement are generated based on these metrics. The proposed metrics are completely unsupervised in nature and they are derived from a set of simple corpus statistics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics as compared to other existing baseline metrics in our experiments.

Evaluation Metrics for Depth and Flow of Knowledge in Non-fiction Narrative Texts

This paper presents the Candide model as a computational architecture for modelling human-like, narrative-based language understanding. The model starts from the idea that narratives emerge through the process of interpreting novel linguistic observations, such as utterances, paragraphs and texts, with respect to previously acquired knowledge and beliefs. Narratives are personal, as they are rooted in past experiences, and constitute perspectives on the world that might motivate different interpretations of the same observations. Concretely, the Candide model operationalises this idea by dynamically modelling the belief systems and background knowledge of individual agents, updating these as new linguistic observations come in, and exposing them to a logic reasoning engine that reveals the possible sources of divergent interpretations. Apart from introducing the foundational ideas, we also present a proof-of-concept implementation that demonstrates the approach through a number of illustrative examples.

The Candide model: How narratives emerge where observations meet beliefs

In this position paper, we contend that advancing our understanding of narrative and the effective generation of longer, subjectively engaging texts is crucial for progress in modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) and potentially the broader field of Artificial Intelligence. We highlight the current lack of appropriate datasets, evaluation methods, and operational concepts necessary for initiating work on narrative processing.

What is Wrong with Language Models that Can Not Tell a Story?

Stories about everyday situations are an essential part of human communication, motivating the need to develop AI agents that can reliably understand these stories. Despite the long list of supervised methods for story completion and procedural understanding, current AI has no mechanisms to automatically track and explain procedures in unseen stories. To bridge this gap, we study the ability of AI models to
transfer procedural knowledge to novel narrative tasks in a transparent manner. We design LEAP: a comprehensive framework that integrates state-of-the-art modeling architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies based on both natural and synthetic stories. To address the lack of densely annotated training data, we devise a robust automatic labeler based on few-shot prompting to enhance the aug mented data. Our experiments with in- and out of-domain tasks reveal insights into the interplay of different architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies. LEAP’s labeler has a clear positive impact on out-of-domain datasets, while the resulting dense annotation provides native explainability

Transferring Procedural Knowledge across Commonsense Tasks

This paper proposes a sentiment-centric pipeline to perform unsupervised plot extraction on non-linear novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a novel widely considered to be “plotless.” Combining transformer-based sentiment analysis models with statistical testing, we model sentiment’s rate-of-change and correspondingly segment the novel into emotionally self-contained units qualitatively evaluated to be meaningful surrogate pseudo-chapters. We validate our findings by evaluating our pipeline as a fully unsupervised text segmentation model, achieving a F-1 score of 0.643 (regional) and 0.214 (exact) in chapter break prediction on a validation set of linear novels with existing chapter structures. In addition, we observe notable differences between the distributions of predicted chapter lengths in linear and non-linear fictional narratives, with the latter exhibiting significantly greater variability. Our results hold significance for narrative researchers appraising methods for extracting plots from non-linear novels.

Mrs. Dalloway Said She Would Segment the Chapters Herself

We present a novel approach to modeling narratives using narrative chain embeddings.
A new dataset of narrative chains extracted from German news texts is presented.
With neural methods, we produce models for both German and English that achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Multiple Choice Narrative Cloze task.
Subsequently, we perform an extrinsic evaluation of the embeddings our models produce and show that they perform rather poorly in identifying narratively similar texts. We explore some of the reasons for this underperformance and discuss the upsides of our approach.
We provide an outlook on alternative ways to model narratives, as well as techniques for evaluating such models.

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