Integration of Linguistic Markup into Semantic Models of Folk Narratives: The Fairy Tale Use Case

Propp’s influential structural analysis of fairy tales created a powerful schema for representing storylines in terms of character functions, which is straightforward to exploit in computational semantic analysis and procedural generation of stories of this genre. We tackle two resources that draw on the Proppian model – one formalizes it as a semantic markup scheme and the other as an ontology – both lacking linguistic phenomena explicitly represented in them. The need for integrating linguistic information into structured semantic resources is motivated by the emergence of suitable standards that facilitate this, and the benefits such joint representation would create for transdisciplinary research across Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence.