  Stories are a vital form of communication in human culture; they are employed
daily to persuade, to elicit sympathy, or to convey a message. Computational
understanding of human narratives, especially high-level narrative structures,
remain limited to date. Multiple literary theories for narrative structures
exist, but operationalization of the theories has remained a challenge. We
developed an annotation scheme by consolidating and extending existing
narratological theories, including Labov and Waletsky's (1967) functional
categorization scheme and Freytag's (1863) pyramid of dramatic tension, and
present 360 annotated short stories collected from online sources. In the
future, this research will support an approach that enables systems to
intelligently sustain complex communications with humans.

Computation and Language