arXiv subjects

Boyang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Boyang Li.

148 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Annotating High-Level Structures of Short Stories and Personal Anecdotes

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.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Heterogeneous Knowledge Transfer in Video Emotion Recognition, Attribution and Summarization

Emotion is a key element in user-generated videos. However, it is difficult to understand emotions conveyed in such videos due to the complex and unstructured nature of user-generated content and the sparsity of video frames expressing emotion. In this paper, for the first time, we study the problem of transferring knowledge from heterogeneous external sources, including image and textual data, to facilitate three related tasks in understanding video emotion: emotion recognition, emotion attribution and emotion-oriented summarization. Specifically, our framework (1) learns a video encoding from an auxiliary emotional image dataset in order to improve supervised video emotion recognition, and (2) transfers knowledge from an auxiliary textual corpora for zero-shot recognition of emotion classes unseen during training. The proposed technique for knowledge transfer facilitates novel applications of emotion attribution and emotion-oriented summarization. A comprehensive set of experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels

Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more comprehensive measure of book content, this study harnesses a massive archive of content labels, also known as 'tags', created by users of an online book catalogue, Goodreads.com. Combined with data on preferences and personality scores collected from Facebook users, the tag labels achieve high accuracy in personality prediction by psychological standards. We also group tags into broader genres, to check their validity against past findings. Our results are robust across both tag and genre levels of analyses, and consistent with existing literature. Moreover, user-generated tag labels reveal unexpected insights, such as cultural differences, book reading behaviors, and other non-content factors affecting preferences. To our knowledge, this is currently the largest study that explores the relationship between personality and book content preferences.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Predicting the Quality of Short Narratives from Social Media

An important and difficult challenge in building computational models for narratives is the automatic evaluation of narrative quality. Quality evaluation connects narrative understanding and generation as generation systems need to evaluate their own products. To circumvent difficulties in acquiring annotations, we employ upvotes in social media as an approximate measure for story quality. We collected 54,484 answers from a crowd-powered question-and-answer website, Quora, and then used active learning to build a classifier that labeled 28,320 answers as stories. To predict the number of upvotes without the use of social network features, we create neural networks that model textual regions and the interdependence among regions, which serve as strong benchmarks for future research. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale study for automatic evaluation of narrative quality.

cs.CL↗