Call for Papers

Topics

We solicit papers that present new datasets, systems and methods, and evaluation methodologies for topics related to narrative understanding. These topics include but are not limited to:

• The cognitive process of storytelling. Understanding of the science behind storytelling, and what distinguishes a successful narrative from an unsuccessful one.

• Event-centric narrative understanding. Building structured machine-consumable representations of plots and scripts, and models of acquiring and representing commonsense knowledge.

• Character-centric narrative understanding. Methods that focus on understanding narratives from a social perspective. Topics include identifying characters in a narratives, modeling characters as social goal-oriented agents, their interaction with other characters or the environment, their similarity with other entities, social network analysis, etc. 

• Cultural analytics. Approaches to the data-driven analysis of narrative to answer empirical research questions in the humanities, including (but not limited to) the domains of literature and folklore.

• Evaluating narrative understanding. Methods for evaluation of narrative understanding skills via objective tasks such as reading comprehension, story QA, story-cloze etc. 

• Story generation. Systems that focus on automatic generation of coherent and meaningful stories

• Narratives in social media. Applications of identifying and analyzing narratives in social media  

• Multimodal narratives. Methods for narrative understanding in domains that extend beyond textual data (such as images, videos and music). 

Author Guidelines

Submissions should be 4 to 8 pages in length excluding references, and should be formatted using ACL guidelines. 

The review process will be double-blind, and so submissions must not identify authors or their affiliations. 

Authors can choose an archival or a non-archival submission by indicating their choice as a footnote on the first page of the submission (by default the submissions will be considered non-archival). Only new and unpublished work is acceptable for archival submissions. They will be published in the workshop proceedings. For non-archival submissions, previously published (or under-review) work is acceptable. A non-archival submission does not preclude publications in other venues. 

Accepted papers will be presented during the workshop as posters and/or oral talks and there will be no differentiation between archived and non-archived submissions during presentations.