Actionable Entities Recognition Benchmark for Interactive Fiction

Abstract

Chekhov's gun is a dramatic principle stating that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. This paper presents a new natural language processing task -Chekhov's gun recognition or (CGR)recognition of entities that are pivotal for the development of the plot. Though similar to classical Named Entity Recognition (NER) it has profound differences and is crucial for the tasks of narrative processing, since Chekhov's guns have a profound impact on the causal relationship in a story. The paper presents a new benchmark dataset for the CGR task that includes 5550 descriptions with one or more Chekhov's Gun in each and validates the task on two more datasets available in the natural language processing (NLP) literature."One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." Chekhov in his letter to Lazarev.Preprint. Under review.