We present ongoing research on the role of motifs in oral transmission of stories. We assume that motifs constitute the primary building blocks of stories. On the basis of a quantitative analysis we show that the level of motif annotation utilized in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type catalogue is well suited to analyze two genres of folktales in terms of motif sequences. However, for the o...

Stories containing counterintuitive concepts are prevalent in a variety of cultural forms including folktales, TV and radio commercials, and religious parables. Cognitive scientists such as Boyer [2, 3] suggest that this may be because counterintuitive concepts are surprising and more memorable for people and therefore are more likely to become widespread in a culture. How and why people rememb...

Radical green theory proclaims that the origins of environmental catastrophe lie in anthropocentrism modern capitalism. This necessitates formation healthier societies wherein humans perceive their selves ‘in relation’ to nature. The deep ecology (Naess, 1972) calls for reinforcing our sense empathy with all life forms and brings about philosophy “Gaia” (James Lovelock, 1979). idea Earth as a l...

Our research focuses on the problem of automatically acquiring structured narrative information from natural language. We have focused on character extraction and narrative role identification from a corpus of Slavic folktales. To address natural language processing (NLP) issues in this particular domain we have explored alternatives to linear pipelined architectures for information extraction,...

Abstract This paper presents a linguistically uninformed computational model for animacy classification. The model makes use of word n-grams in combination with lower dimensional word embedding representations that are learned from a web-scale corpus. We compare the model to a number of linguistically informed models that use features such as dependency tags and show competitive results. We app...