Interpreting Themes from Educational Stories

Yigeng Zhang, Fabio Gonzalez, Thamar Solorio


Abstract
Reading comprehension continues to be a crucial research focus in the NLP community. Recent advances in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) have mostly centered on literal comprehension, referring to the surface-level understanding of content. In this work, we focus on the next level - interpretive comprehension, with a particular emphasis on inferring the themes of a narrative text. We introduce the first dataset specifically designed for interpretive comprehension of educational narratives, providing corresponding well-edited theme texts. The dataset spans a variety of genres and cultural origins and includes human-annotated theme keywords with varying levels of granularity. We further formulate NLP tasks under different abstractions of interpretive comprehension toward the main idea of a story. After conducting extensive experiments with state-of-the-art methods, we found the task to be both challenging and significant for NLP research. The dataset and source code have been made publicly available to the research community at https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/EduStory.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.805
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
9190–9203
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.805
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yigeng Zhang, Fabio Gonzalez, and Thamar Solorio. 2024. Interpreting Themes from Educational Stories. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 9190–9203, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Interpreting Themes from Educational Stories (Zhang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.805.pdf