@inproceedings{wu-etal-2023-word,
    title = "Word Category Arcs in Literature Across Languages and Genres",
    author = "Wu, Winston  and
      Wang, Lu  and
      Mihalcea, Rada",
    editor = "Akoury, Nader  and
      Clark, Elizabeth  and
      Iyyer, Mohit  and
      Chaturvedi, Snigdha  and
      Brahman, Faeze  and
      Chandu, Khyathi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Narrative Understanding",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.wnu-1.6",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.wnu-1.6",
    pages = "36--47",
    abstract = "Word category arcs measure the progression of word usage across a story. Previous work on arcs has explored structural and psycholinguistic arcs through the course of narratives, but so far it has been limited to {\textbackslash}textit{English} narratives and a narrow set of word categories covering binary emotions and cognitive processes. In this paper, we expand over previous work by (1) introducing a novel, general approach to quantitatively analyze word usage arcs for any word category through a combination of clustering and filtering; and (2) exploring narrative arcs in literature in eight different languages across multiple genres. Through multiple experiments and analyses, we quantify the nature of narratives across languages, corroborating existing work on monolingual narrative arcs as well as drawing new insights about the interpretation of arcs through correlation analyses.",
}

Word category arcs measure the progression of word usage across a story. Previous work on arcs has explored structural and psycholinguistic arcs through the course of narratives, but so far it has been limited to {\textbackslash}textit{English} narratives and a narrow set of word categories covering binary emotions and cognitive processes. In this paper, we expand over previous work by (1) introducing a novel, general approach to quantitatively analyze word usage arcs for any word category through a combination of clustering and filtering; and (2) exploring narrative arcs in literature in eight different languages across multiple genres. Through multiple experiments and analyses, we quantify the nature of narratives across languages, corroborating existing work on monolingual narrative arcs as well as drawing new insights about the interpretation of arcs through correlation analyses.
Wu, Winston Wang, Lu Mihalcea, Rada
Word Category Arcs in Literature Across Languages and Genres