English

FaNS: a Facet-based Narrative Similarity Metric

Computation and Language 2024-03-05 v2

Abstract

Similar Narrative Retrieval is a crucial task since narratives are essential for explaining and understanding events, and multiple related narratives often help to create a holistic view of the event of interest. To accurately identify semantically similar narratives, this paper proposes a novel narrative similarity metric called Facet-based Narrative Similarity (FaNS), based on the classic 5W1H facets (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How), which are extracted by leveraging the state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike existing similarity metrics that only focus on overall lexical/semantic match, FaNS provides a more granular matching along six different facets independently and then combines them. To evaluate FaNS, we created a comprehensive dataset by collecting narratives from AllSides, a third-party news portal. Experimental results demonstrate that the FaNS metric exhibits a higher correlation (37\% higher) than traditional text similarity metrics that directly measure the lexical/semantic match between narratives, demonstrating its effectiveness in comparing the finer details between a pair of narratives.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.04823,
  title  = {FaNS: a Facet-based Narrative Similarity Metric},
  author = {Mousumi Akter and Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.04823},
  year   = {2024}
}