Hearing All Voices

Deep Narrative Analysis' (DNA's) long-term goals will be achieved by research and experimentation, taking small steps and refining our designs. Our ultimate goal is to create a tool that compares narratives and news articles, and indicates where they align and diverge, what events are mentioned (or omitted), and what words are used. This, then, can be used to understand if a news article is biased, or if there are certain themes that are consistent across a set of narratives and articles. Regarding themes in narratives, DNA can be used to find evidence regarding what combination of circumstances, actions and events are correlated with an individual's success or failure in a situation, such as overcoming addiction. To achieve this long-term goal, we need to transform the text of a news article or narrative into a semantically-rich, machine-processable format. Our choice for that format is a knowledge graph . The transformation is accomplished using syntactic and semantic pro...

Deep Narrative Analysis (DNA) makes extensive use of ontology and knowledge graph technologies. Unfortunately, these topics are not well understood. In fact, there are entire books dedicated to these subjects, as well as multiple 10+ page papers. blog posts and web sites. But those definitions can be complicated and not very meaningful to IT and business people. This post is an attempt to provide simple definitions. An ontology can be specified as: A description of the kinds of things and relationships in a topic area, specified in a formal way, and created by a community of users for an explicit purpose Unpacking the definition, it is important to highlight that: One of the most important goals of an ontology is to communicate the concepts and knowledge (and increase the understanding) of the topic area within the "community of users" This enables sharing and reuse of the knowledge encoded using the ontology The "description" requires understanding and detailing th...