Measuring narrative fluency by analyzing dynamic interaction networks in textual narratives

This study aims to assess the fluency of narratives in textual multimedia (e.g., news articles, academic publications, novels, etc.). We measure the narrative fluency based on whether relationships between entities in the narrative (i.e., subjects and objects of events that compose the narrative) are consistently described with adequate rapidity. The relationships are represented by a dynamic interaction network (called 'entity network'), which has entities as nodes and co-occurrences between the entities as edges. Lack of consistency makes users confused about what the textual narratives want to present. If a narrative consistently concentrates on a topic or subject, its entity network will have few entities with high node centrality. Using consistency of the high centrality entities, we assess the fluency with three criteria: (i) consistency in each paragraph, (ii) consistency in the overall narrative, and (iii) consistency between the title and body. The rapidity of narrative development has to be appropriate for expected readers of the textual narratives. Too low rapidity causes redundancy, and high rapidity hinders the under-standability of the narratives. We assume structural changes in the entity network reflect the narrative rapidity. The structural change is measured by embedding structures of the entity network. Finally, we evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed methods using the editorials of the New York Times and human evaluators.