How narratives move your mind: A corpus of shared-character stories for connecting emotional flow and interestingness

User-centered categorization of mood in fiction

Purpose

Readers articulate mood in deeply subjective ways, yet the underlying structure of users' understanding of the media they consume has important implications for retrieval and access. User articulations might at first seem too idiosyncratic, but organizing them meaningfully has considerable potential to provide a better searching experience for all involved. The current study develops mood categories inductively for fiction organization and retrieval in information systems.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors developed and distributed an open-ended survey to 76 fiction readers to understand their preferences with regard to the affective elements in fiction. From the fiction reader responses, the research team identified 161 mood terms and used them for further categorization.

Findings

The inductive approach resulted in 30 categories, including angry, cozy, dark and nostalgic. Results include three overlapping mood families: Emotion, Tone/Narrative, and Atmosphere/Setting, which in turn relate to structures that connect reader-generated data with conceptual frameworks in previous studies.

Originality/value

The inherent complexity of “mood” should not dissuade researchers from carefully investigating users' preferences in this regard. Adding to the existing efforts of classifying moods conducted by experts, the current study presents mood terms provided by actual end-users when describing different moods in fiction. This study offers a useful roadmap for creating taxonomies for retrieval and description, as well as structures derived from user-provided terms that ultimately have the potential to improve user experience.

Construction of English and American Literature Corpus Based on Machine Learning Algorithm

In China, the application of corpus in language teaching, especially in English and American literature teaching, is still in the preliminary research stage, and there are various shortcomings, which have not been paid due attention by front-line educators. Constructing English and American literature corpus according to certain principles can effectively promote English and American literature teaching. The research of this paper is devoted to how to automatically build a corpus of English and American literature. In the process of keyword extraction, key phrases and keywords are effectively combined. The similarity between atomic events is calculated by the TextRank algorithm, and then the first N sentences with high similarity are selected and sorted. Based on ML (machine learning) text classification method, a combined classifier based on SVM (support vector machine) and NB (Naive Bayes) is proposed. The experimental results show that, from the point of view of accuracy and recall, the classification effect of the combined algorithm proposed in this paper is the best among the three methods. The best classification results of accuracy, recall, and F value are 0.87, 0.9, and 0.89, respectively. Experimental results show that this method can quickly, accurately, and persistently obtain high-quality bilingual mixed web pages.