A method for automatic plot analysis of narrative texts that uses components of both traditional symbolic analysis of natural language and statistical machine-learning is presented for the story rewriting task. In the story rewriting task, an exemplar story is read to the pupils and the pupils rewrite the story in their own words. This allows them to practice language skills such as spelling, diction, and grammar without being stymied by content creation. Often the pupil improperly recalls the story. Our method of automatic plot analysis enables the tutoring system to automatically analyze the student's story for both general coherence and specific missing events.
Harry Halpin, Johanna D. Moore, Judy Robertson