Event extraction in a plot advice agent

Abstract

In this paper we present how the automatic extraction of events from text can be used to both classify narrative texts according to plot quality and produce advice in an interactive learning environment intended to help students with story writing. We focus on the story rewriting task, in which an exemplar story is read to the students and the students rewrite the story in their own words. The system automatically extracts events from the raw text, formalized as a sequence of temporally ordered predicate-arguments. These events are given to a machine-learner that produces a coarse-grained rating of the story. The results of the machine-learner and the extracted events are then used to generate fine-grained advice for the students. © 2006 Association for Computational Linguistics.