The Power of Narrative

Welcome to the first OntoInsights blog post which explains the company’s focus on narratives. 

People have listened to and studied stories for insights into cultures, customs, values and life. They have used narratives to explain how and why the world works, and their experiences in it. Stories are humans’ approach to structuring knowledge and providing insight. 

Listeners can easily extract knowledge from narratives, but for a computer to do this, a combination of approaches and technologies is needed: 
  • Natural language processing (NLP) to parse the text 
  • Semantic (ontological) and linguistic understanding to distill meaning 
  • Graph technologies to encode the events of the narratives and background knowledge 
  • Pattern recognition algorithms to discover similarities and differences 
  • Inference, reasoning and causal analysis to extract knowledge and provide explanations 
No one company can possibly do all these things, but that is no longer a requirement. The current software development environment provides the necessary tools as open-source, and the engineering problem is how to use and combine them to understand narratives. 

The following components (in a Python framework) are assembled to create the needed "combination of approaches and technologies" discussed above: 
These are flexibly combined, “under the covers”, within a user-driven interface to create a complete environment. 

The "magic sauce" is not the core algorithms, but in how they are assembled, and with what semantic and programmatic insights. This is not about solving the difficult problem of narrative understanding automatically, but about assisting people and groups to define and refine their theories about what is happening in the world, based on analyzing narratives. In addition, since all the narratives and details are retained, none of the personality or individuality of the stories are lost. The human element is captured in all its idiosyncratic forms, and is not reduced to numbers or aggregations for ease of analysis. In this way, peoples’ experiences can be better understood and the perspectives of “non-authoritative voices” can be heard – giving a voice to people who have been left out of the mainstream discussions on issues of poverty, addiction, economic mobility and much more. 

OntoInsights’ goals are to provide an infrastructure to automate work such as conducted at the University of Arizona, by Christina Greene (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016718521000518). In her paper, she states “Droughts are both a biophysical event and a social event. However, drought planning and response is dominated by physical science framings of drought while the social dynamics of drought are poorly monitored or ignored … This can lead to a mismatch between how drought policies identify and respond to drought versus how droughts are being experienced by people … Understanding how droughts are understood and experienced by people and communities is critical to making the human impacts of drought visible.” 

Our hypothesis is that narratives and life stories gathered directly from individuals and families in environments and situations of interest represent an unconstrained and rich source of information. This approach improves on standard surveys because it better captures insight into the complex interdependent constraints of people’s lives, which can provide a greater understanding into causes and effects, and into the rationale for limited or successful impact of current and past programs intended to help. Further, since the approach (by necessity) engages the community, its findings create a mechanism for meaningful discussions so that all stakeholders can work to co-develop solutions.

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