Towards a Linguistic Evaluation of Narratives: A Quantitative Stylistic Framework
Fuente:
arXiv
Salvato in:
| Autore principale: | |
|---|---|
| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
|
| Soggetti: | |
| Accesso online: | |
| Tags: |
Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
|
| _version_ | 1866917425566449664 |
|---|---|
| author | Maisto, Alessandro |
| author_facet | Maisto, Alessandro |
| contents | The evaluation of narrative quality remains a complex challenge, as it involves subjective factors such as plot, character development, and emotional impact. This work proposes a quantitative approach to narrative assessment by focusing on the linguistic dimension as a primary indicator of quality. The paper presents a methodology for the automatic evaluation of narrative based on the extraction of a comprehensive set of 33 quantitative linguistic features categorized into lexical, syntactic, and semantic groups. To test the model, an experiment was conducted on a specialized corpus of 23 books, including canonical masterpieces and self-published works. Through a similarity matrix, the system successfully clustered the narratives, distinguishing almost perfectly between professionally edited and self-published texts. Furthermore, the methodology was validated against a human-annotated dataset; it significantly outperforms traditional story-level evaluation metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of quantitative linguistic features in assessing narrative quality. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19261 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Towards a Linguistic Evaluation of Narratives: A Quantitative Stylistic Framework Maisto, Alessandro Computation and Language The evaluation of narrative quality remains a complex challenge, as it involves subjective factors such as plot, character development, and emotional impact. This work proposes a quantitative approach to narrative assessment by focusing on the linguistic dimension as a primary indicator of quality. The paper presents a methodology for the automatic evaluation of narrative based on the extraction of a comprehensive set of 33 quantitative linguistic features categorized into lexical, syntactic, and semantic groups. To test the model, an experiment was conducted on a specialized corpus of 23 books, including canonical masterpieces and self-published works. Through a similarity matrix, the system successfully clustered the narratives, distinguishing almost perfectly between professionally edited and self-published texts. Furthermore, the methodology was validated against a human-annotated dataset; it significantly outperforms traditional story-level evaluation metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of quantitative linguistic features in assessing narrative quality. |
| title | Towards a Linguistic Evaluation of Narratives: A Quantitative Stylistic Framework |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19261 |