An Analysis of Emotion Communication Channels in Fan-Fiction: Towards Emotional Storytelling

Evgeny Kim, Roman Klinger


Abstract
Centrality of emotion for the stories told by humans is underpinned by numerous studies in literature and psychology. The research in automatic storytelling has recently turned towards emotional storytelling, in which characters’ emotions play an important role in the plot development (Theune et al., 2004; y Perez, 2007; Mendez et al., 2016). However, these studies mainly use emotion to generate propositional statements in the form “A feels affection towards B” or “A confronts B”. At the same time, emotional behavior does not boil down to such propositional descriptions, as humans display complex and highly variable patterns in communicating their emotions, both verbally and non-verbally. In this paper, we analyze how emotions are expressed non-verbally in a corpus of fan fiction short stories. Our analysis shows that stories written by humans convey character emotions along various non-verbal channels. We find that some non-verbal channels, such as facial expressions and voice characteristics of the characters, are more strongly associated with joy, while gestures and body postures are more likely to occur with trust. Based on our analysis, we argue that automatic storytelling systems should take variability of emotion into account when generating descriptions of characters’ emotions.
Anthology ID:
W19-3406
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Storytelling
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Francis Ferraro, Ting-Hao ‘Kenneth’ Huang, Stephanie M. Lukin, Margaret Mitchell
Venue:
Story-NLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
56–64
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3406
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-3406
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Evgeny Kim and Roman Klinger. 2019. An Analysis of Emotion Communication Channels in Fan-Fiction: Towards Emotional Storytelling. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Storytelling, pages 56–64, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Analysis of Emotion Communication Channels in Fan-Fiction: Towards Emotional Storytelling (Kim & Klinger, Story-NLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3406.pdf