Part 6: Finishing the Timeline

Previous: Embedded Actions and Alternate Timelines

We're almost done modeling actions and properties. In a new Story Point, indicate that the crow cawed:

After you accept it, hit the + button by the cawing action to add a modifier. First, the easy one: "loudly".

Then, tackle the complex modifier: "to show the Fox that she could sing." A few of the supported modifiers, after you hit the + again, are in the folder "Connectives" -- so called because they connect the modifier to other actions, properties and timelines. The "in order to do an action" modifier is a good choice here. The action is "demonstrates"; the demonstrated property is "able to do an action" (under the "Abilities" property folder); the action whose ability is being demonstrated is "sings". Hence we get our deepest construction yet:

We're on a roll now. The cheese falling is easy:

We can also take the opportunity to cease the ongoing property whereby the cheese is in the crow's beak. Make sure continuous properties are displayed (under Display Options) and hit the octogonal red "stop" sign on the cheese's placement property.

"The fox, snatching it up" is easy:

"You have a voice, madam, I see...": Here, I take a bit of license by spelling out the implication that the fox thinks (perhaps sarcastically) that the crow's voice is beautiful. (The literal existence of the crow's voice is not in question.)

For "what you want is wits", we again have a situation where we have to spell out what's implied. We have a property that indicates obligation, a property for desire, and a property for possession. Put them all together, and the fox can state his opinion that the crow is obliged to want intelligence. (Note that I had to set up "wits" as an abstract quality.)

Once we accept that, we have a fully functional timeline.

So we've done it! The whole fable is encoded in symbols that represent classes of nouns, actions, properties, and so on. Think about what this exercise forced us to decode about the story: who is acting (coreference resolution), time (temporal sequencing), in what modality (alternate timelines) and with what general kinds of nouns and verbs from among established ontologies (VerbNet and WordNet as incorporated into the Scheherazade knowledge base). This is a kind of multidimensional annotation process, but one that (hopefully) was reasonably easy to pick up.

But wait ... there's more!

So far we've answered the who, what, and when of the fable, but we've said very little about why. In fact, the only times we indicated "why" was when the author (or, rather, the translator) specifically inserted a "why" clause. We haven't encoded the kind of "whys" that require us to read between the lines. In my experiments, I found that "why" was hugely important to doing any kind of useful corpus analysis -- more important than the sum of all the who, what and when annotation we just finished. In fact, I had annotators basically skip the timeline annotation and only answer the "why" questions, and that allowed them to work on much longer and complex texts than this fable, because they didn't have to try to model every last verb and noun. Of course, my research goals are probably different than yours, so perhaps you will find timeline annotation sufficient for your needs without any modeling of the "why". But if you're like me and want to annotate the story in terms of motivation and agency, follow on to the next section.

Next: Interpretations