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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Situational Dimensions that drive Event Boundaries

Gabriel Arthur Daniel Kressin Palacios¹, Dhruva Arekar, Christopher Honey¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

Presenter: Gabriel Arthur Daniel Kressin Palacios

Humans maintain an internal representation of the agents, locations, goals, and causal relationships of their present situation. In the study of event cognition, two central ideas are that (i) people automatically segment continuous streams of experience into discrete event representations, and (ii) boundaries between events correspond to moments of prediction error from active event models. Here, we asked whether event boundaries could be reliably predicted directly from discontinuities in a small set of event dimensions, such as locations and goals within narrative text. We defined dimension rating criteria using event boundaries in an initial story and then applied these criteria to map discontinuities and predict event boundaries in a held-out natural text. Our decision tree model predicted the held-out event boundaries above chance. These preliminary results suggest that the detection of simple discontinuities, such as changes in location or agents within a narrative, provides a concrete and interpretable model of event boundary generation.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF