Reasoning about the temporal structure of narratives

摘要: Narratives are a type of discourse used to describe sequences events. Standard examples narratives novels, short-stories, biographies, and histories. can be contrasted with other types, such as lyric poetry expository prose, in which the temporal element is not so central. Because nature narratives, one most important tasks for understanding them determining relations that exist among events described narrative. These their constitute what called story This dissertation concentrates on study issues involved structure narratives. two major types: (1) how relationships hold these represented, (2) does reader determine events. Central our discussion concepts narrative now-point narrative-line. The special Reference-Time represent present moment within story. At least part analysis different tenses, aspects, time adverbials function involves interaction with, effects on, this now-point. We define narrative-line stretch controlled by, or scope of, single further basic contains no follows certain simplifying restrictions. By restricting ourselves "well-behaved" we simple set general rules extracting from only factors taken into consideration by tense, aspect, event-type, Narrative Convention, says unless (the readers) given some signal contrary, assume occurred order they presented text. narrative, defined it, base case upon more complex types defined. We then extend cover narrative-lines contain various adverbials, including frame duration, relational adverbials. Next, large-scale show understood consisting narrative-lines, each requires its own now-point. Finally, implementation parser read includes duration. As output, builds model story, those