Robust Symbolic Reasoning for Visual Narratives via Hierarchical and Semantically Normalized Knowledge Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Chen, Yi-Chun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chen, Yi-Chun
author_facet Chen, Yi-Chun
contents Understanding visual narratives such as comics requires structured representations that capture events, characters, and their relations across multiple levels of story organization. However, symbolic narrative graphs often suffer from inconsistency and redundancy, where similar actions or events are labeled differently across annotations or contexts. Such variance limits the effectiveness of reasoning and generalization. This paper introduces a semantic normalization framework for hierarchical narrative knowledge graphs. Building on cognitively grounded models of narrative comprehension, we propose methods that consolidate semantically related actions and events using lexical similarity and embedding-based clustering. The normalization process reduces annotation noise, aligns symbolic categories across narrative levels, and preserves interpretability. We demonstrate the framework on annotated manga stories from the Manga109 dataset, applying normalization to panel-, event-, and story-level graphs. Preliminary evaluations across narrative reasoning tasks, such as action retrieval, character grounding, and event summarization, show that semantic normalization improves coherence and robustness, while maintaining symbolic transparency. These findings suggest that normalization is a key step toward scalable, cognitively inspired graph models for multimodal narrative understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_14941
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Symbolic Reasoning for Visual Narratives via Hierarchical and Semantically Normalized Knowledge Graphs
Chen, Yi-Chun
Multimedia
Computation and Language
Understanding visual narratives such as comics requires structured representations that capture events, characters, and their relations across multiple levels of story organization. However, symbolic narrative graphs often suffer from inconsistency and redundancy, where similar actions or events are labeled differently across annotations or contexts. Such variance limits the effectiveness of reasoning and generalization. This paper introduces a semantic normalization framework for hierarchical narrative knowledge graphs. Building on cognitively grounded models of narrative comprehension, we propose methods that consolidate semantically related actions and events using lexical similarity and embedding-based clustering. The normalization process reduces annotation noise, aligns symbolic categories across narrative levels, and preserves interpretability. We demonstrate the framework on annotated manga stories from the Manga109 dataset, applying normalization to panel-, event-, and story-level graphs. Preliminary evaluations across narrative reasoning tasks, such as action retrieval, character grounding, and event summarization, show that semantic normalization improves coherence and robustness, while maintaining symbolic transparency. These findings suggest that normalization is a key step toward scalable, cognitively inspired graph models for multimodal narrative understanding.
title Robust Symbolic Reasoning for Visual Narratives via Hierarchical and Semantically Normalized Knowledge Graphs
topic Multimedia
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14941