DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1226833
title: Narrative Acts Catalog

description: <strong>Context</strong>

This Catalog of Narrative Acts is a product of the research project "Fine-grained EvaLuation of the Interactive Narrative Experience" (FELINE) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

While the FELINE project focuses mainly on the evaluation of computer-based Interactive Narratives, a subgoal is the identification of narrative acts that occur in both interactive and non-interactive narratives.

This catalog features a collection of narrative acts. A narrative act is a linguistic form that represents a complex action which embeds a secondary action, the embedded action being one of the core actions in the story. For example, in “Marc encourages Mary to study hard”, “to encourage” is the complex action and “to study hard” is the secondary/embedded action.

<strong>Methodology</strong>

The narrative acts presented in this catalog were not extracted from a definite corpus of narrative texts but rather from existing sources including theories and computational models implementing a theory (narrative and/or speech act theories). Computational models are implementations adapting a respective theory.

This catalog was established by hand by the researchers via a close reading of the sources. Initially coded in a spreadsheet, data was migrated to a database that can be accessed and modified via an online interactive visualization tool https://tecfalabs.unige.ch/narrativeacts_vis/ [at the time of deposit, 11.2018]. The produced data was then dumped into a comma-separated values file for archiving purposes.

<strong>Usage of the data</strong>

The catalog can be used either by researchers, for the purpose of narrative studies, or by authors of interactive narratives since some systems could make use of narrative acts as a paradigm for structuring narratives.<br>
 

Each line is composed of the following fields:


	id: Index of the narrative act, alphabetically-sorted.
	name: Name of the narrative act
	predicate_form: narrative acts are coded using a predicate form (https://tecfalabs.unige.ch/narrativeacts_vis/information#predicate). For example: Encourage(X, Y, a)
	sources: Theories or computational models where the narrative act is present.
	involved char: Number of involved characters: it represents the number of active characters that are involved when the action is executed. Example: “Marc tells Mary that July is beautiful”. Here Marc and Mary are the two only involved characters (2).
	type: defines if the narrative act is an action about an action (AA), an action about a state (AS), a state about an action (SA) or a state about a state (SS)
	seq_position: Sequence position. The sequence position corresponds to the ordering of the principal action related to the secondary action. It can be before, during or after.
	domain: First level of classification of a narrative act. There are six domains in total.
	class: Second level of classification of a narrative act, each class belonging to a domain.
	level_abs: Level of abstraction. This attribute corresponds to the complexity of a narrative act: most narrative acts are complexity 2 since they are actions about an action, whereas complexity 3 corresponds to a more generic acts encompassing a complexity 2 narrative act.
	valence: valence is a linguistic characteristic of a verb. It corresponds to the number of elements that are connected to that verb. The element can be active or passive. A verb can be avalent (i.e. to rain) and it can have a different valence according to how it is used (i.e. He gives a gift (v=1), He gives a gift to her (v=2))
	comment: Additional comments if needed (optional).<br>