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PhD Dissertation Defense - Sabyasachee Baruah

Title: Character-centric Computational Narrative Understanding  
 
Date and Time: April 30th, 2025: 2:00p - 4:00p  
 
Location: RTH 320  
 
Committee Members: Dr. Shrikanth Narayanan (chair), Dr. Maja Mataric, and Dr. Morteza Dehghani (outside member  
 
Abstract: Narrative is a mechanism through which we try to understand the world. We use stories to communicate with each other, assign meaning to our actions, and create interpersonal bonds through similar experiences. It is important to study narratives to find the qualities of effective storytelling, understand how they enable human collaboration, and study the representation of people and ideas. However, even though substantial discourse on narrative understanding exists in the research community, it lacks a uniform and structured computational approach. Therefore, in this dissertation, I define narrativity and propose a modality-agnostic computational pipeline to study narratives. I identify the essential building blocks of narratives – characters, events, attributes, and relations – and define how their interaction creates narrativity. I focus on the character-centric tasks of the proposed pipeline to underscore the importance of narrative characters. I categorize the various character understanding tasks, and present my contributions towards the resolution and attribution tasks, building towards a holistic understanding of the narrative.
 
Zoom Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/95907531652?pwd=6eNMG5kHGUec6zICZKYaan3HebWvGS.1
 

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Sabyasachee Baruah

This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.

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