Hey, this looks interesting . . . Inderjeet Mani, of Mitre Corporation, will be here on Monday, speaking on Interpreting Fictional Narrative: Crossing Some Ancient Frontiers. Here’s the abstract:

While progress has been made on computational understanding of the flow of time in non-fictional genres, there has been little attention paid to time in literary texts. I will discuss a new project that examines the intersection between computational linguistics and narratology. I argue that understanding time in fiction requires not only the construction of timelines, but also a grasp of how characters, and readers’ attitudes towards them, evolve. Accordingly, one needs to represent the goals and outcomes of characters’ actions, superimposing a model of plot as an additional layer on top of the timeline. The theory models narrative progression in terms of changes in an ideal reader’s emotional reactions to particular characters as the plot unfolds. In addition to examining samples from well-known literary works, I will discuss progress to date on an annotation scheme for plot and character evaluations.

Perhaps someone from the Classics department can come and comment on how this relates to the ancient theories of tragedy, comedy, etc. I also wonder how his theories work with explicitly time-organized fiction such as that of Jonathan Coe and Richard Ford (and I guess we could throw Wordsworth in there too), as compared to more straightforward narrative.

The talk will be 1:30 PM, Monday May 12th in the Back Open Conference Area of the CS Building. (enter the CS Building within Mudd and ask the receptionist to direct you back).