Abstract

This paper proposes a framework to access information based on a narrative structure of documents. This framework consists of two processes. The one is to decompose existing documents into smaller units. The other process is combining unit components into a new story taking on a new meaning based on a context. In this paper, a narrative structure for documents is modeled as follows. A story corresponding to a document is regarded as a sequence of scenes. A scene is a chunk of sentences. A sentence is mapped into a set of terms in the sentence. Decomposition process gives two mechanisms to decompose a story into scenes. Composition process shows four patterns to connect scenes. Both techniques to decompose/compose a story are based on the notions of term dependency and term attractiveness. This paper also showes visualization tools to express the narrative structure for documents. Word Colony overviews content of a story as a directed graph representing the relation among term dependency. Topic Sequence is also directed graph to show the sequence of scenes along a story plot. The basis of these visualization techniques is the notions of term dependency and term attractiveness. They show the variety of understandings of the same documents.