Objectivity and reproducibility of formal narrative representations or annotations: Propp's functions & narrative summarization
Alexander Block, Rens Bod, Bernhard Fisseni, Adil Kurji, Carlos León, Benedikt Löwe, Deniz Sarikaya

Abstract:
Formal narrative representation is a procedure assigning a formal description 
to a natural language narrative. In general, it is a human procedure, and one 
of the goals of "computational models of narrative" is to understand this 
procedure better in order to automatise it. In order to be automatisable, a 
formal framework should allow for objective and reproducible representations. 
In this paper, we present empirical work focussing on objectivity and 
reproducibility of the Proppian framework and the hypothesis that narrative 
formalisation is summarisation. The first two experiments consider Propp's 
formalisation of Russian fairy tales; the third compares these results to 
summaries of the same stories. The data show that some features of Propp's 
system such as the assignment of the characters to the dramatis personae and 
some of the functions are difficult to reproduce; furthermore, natural 
summaries of folktales do not match the Proppian functions.