Workshop Aims. Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear that, to truly understand and explain human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why narrative is universal and explain (or explain away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop series is to address key, fundamental questions about narrative, using computational techniques, so to advance our understanding of cognition, culture, and society. 
Special Focus: Shared Resources

In addition to fundamental questions, the field has yet to address key needs with regard to shared 
resources and corpora that could smooth and hasten the way forward. The vast majority of work on 
narrative uses fewer than four stories to perform their experiments, and rarely re-uses narratives 
from previous studies. Because NLP technology cannot yet take us all the way to the highly-accurate
formal representations of language semantics, this implies significant amounts of repeated work in 
annotation. The way forward could be catalyzed by carefully constructed shared resources.

This meeting will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing fundamental topics and questions 
regarding narrative. Moreover, the meeting will have a special focus on the identification, 
collection, and construction of shared resources and corpora that facilitate the computational 
modeling of narrative. 
Papers should focus on issues fundamental to computational modeling and scientific understanding, 
or issues related to building shared resources to advance the field. Discussing technological 
applications or motivations is not discouraged, but is not required. Illustrative Topics and 
Questions

     What kinds of shared resources are required for the computational study of narrative?
     What content and modalities should be put in a ?Story Bank?? What formal representations should be used?
     What shared resources are available, or how can already-extant resources be adapted to common needs?
     What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts? What is special that makes something a narrative?
     What are the details of the relationship between narrative and common sense?
     How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a "universal" scheme for encoding episodes?
     What impact do the purpose, function, and genre of a narrative have on its form and content?
     What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? How many possible story lines are there?
     Are there systematic differences in the formal properties of narratives from different cultures?
     What are appropriate representations for narrative? What representations underlie the extraction of narrative schemas?
     How should we evaluate computational models of narrative?

Important Dates

     February 24, 2012 - Submissions due
     March 19, 2012 - Notification of acceptance
     April 4, 2012 - Camera-ready versions due
     May 26-27, 2012 - Workshop (1.5 days)

Submission Details. Submissions should be made through the workshop's START paper submission 
website. Papers may fall into one of three categories: long papers (8 page limit), short papers 
(4 page limit), or position papers (2 page limit). More details on the format will be forthcoming 
in January, 2012. 
Organizing Committee

     Mark A. Finlayson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
     Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
     Deniz Yuret, Koc University, Turkey
     Floris Bex, University of Dundee, UK

Additional Information. There will be a number of travel grants available to authors who have 
papers at the workshop, but would otherwise be unable to attend because of financial constraints.

In preparation is an arrangement with a noted international journal for a special issue featuring 
expanded versions of the best papers from the workshop.

Sponsors.
     ONR Global
     Office of Naval Research
     Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Previous Meetings

     2010 AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Models of Narrative
     2009 MIT Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative