2023/09/14 by I. Doxas, James D. Meiss, Doxas, Isidoros +15
Computer Science · Neuroscience · #Advanced Text Analysis Techniques #Artificial Intelligence in Games #Cognitive Science and Education Research #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.07797
openalex publication_date 2023/09/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When considering the opening part of 1800 short stories, we find that the first dozen paragraphs of the average narrative follow an action principle as defined in arXiv:2309.06600. When the order of the paragraphs is shuffled, the average no longer exhibits this property. The findings show that there is a preferential direction we take in semantic space when starting a story, possibly related to a common Western storytelling tradition as implied by Aristotle in Poetics.