mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

arXiv 1606.07772 ↗First posted 24 Jun 2016cs.CLcited by 69

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Abstract (arXiv)

Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study a culture's evolution through its texts using a "big data" lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection, we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories. We strengthen our findings by separately applying Matrix decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.

Key facts. Cited by 69 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2016.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 11; 2022: 11; 2023: 8; 2024: 10; 2025: 10; 2026: 19.

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  1. 2024Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?cited by 78
  2. 2023AfriSenti: A Twitter Sentiment Analysis Benchmark for African Languagescited by 68
  3. 2023SemEval-2023 Task 12: Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval)cited by 41
  4. 2021FakeFlow: Fake News Detection by Modeling the Flow of Affective Informationcited by 20
  5. 2021Emotion Dynamics in Movie Dialoguescited by 19
  6. 2023Evaluating Emotion Arcs Across Languages: Bridging the Global Divide in Sentiment Analysiscited by 16
  7. 2024HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMscited by 16
  8. 2026The Shape of Beliefs: Geometry, Dynamics, and Interventions along Representation Manifolds of Language Models' Posteriorscited by 15
  9. 2024Surprise! Uniform Information Density Isn't the Whole Story: Predicting Surprisal Contours in Long-form Discoursecited by 14
  10. 2025NarraBench: A Comprehensive Framework for Narrative Benchmarkingcited by 13
  11. 2023Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generationcited by 12
  12. 2024The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novelscited by 12
38 more
  1. 2023Language and Mental Health: Measures of Emotion Dynamics from Text as Linguistic Biosocial Markerscited by 11
  2. 2021Shapes of Emotions: Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations via Emotion Shiftscited by 9
  3. 2022Compression ensembles quantify aesthetic complexity and the evolution of visual artcited by 8
  4. 2022Understanding Narratives through Dimensions of Analogycited by 7
  5. 2022Frustratingly Easy Sentiment Analysis of Text Streams: Generating High-Quality Emotion Arcs Using Emotion Lexiconscited by 6
  6. 2023Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Communitycited by 6
  7. 2023Acting as Inverse Inverse Planningcited by 5
  8. 2024Charting the Shapes of Stories with Game Theorycited by 5
  9. 2021SentimentArcs: A Novel Method for Self-Supervised Sentiment Analysis of Time Series Shows SOTA Transformers Can Struggle Finding Narrative Arcscited by 4
  10. 2022ViNTER: Image Narrative Generation with Emotion-Arc-Aware Transformercited by 4
  11. 2024Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learningcited by 4
  12. 2026Narrix: Remixing Narrative Strategies from Examples for Story Writingcited by 4
  13. 2021Persistence Homology of TEDtalk: Do Sentence Embeddings Have a Topological Shape?cited by 3
  14. 2021SOMTimeS: Self Organizing Maps for Time Series Clustering and its Application to Serious Illness Conversationscited by 2
  15. 2022Computational analyses of the topics, sentiments, literariness, creativity and beauty of texts in a large Corpus of English Literaturecited by 2
  16. 2022A decomposition of book structure through ousiometric fluctuations in cumulative word-timecited by 2
  17. 2025A City of Millions: Mapping Literary Social Networks At Scalecited by 2
  18. 2025Multi-Agent System for AI-Assisted Extraction of Narrative Arcs in TV Seriescited by 2
  19. 2025All Stories Are One Story: Emotional Arc Guided Procedural Game Level Generationcited by 2
  20. 2021Empirically Evaluating Creative Arc Negotiation for Improvisational Decision-makingcited by 1
  21. 2022Imagined versus Remembered Stories: Quantifying Differences in Narrative Flowcited by 1
  22. 2022Revealing Patient-Reported Experiences in Healthcare from Social Media using the DAPMAV Frameworkcited by 1
  23. 2022Automatic Emotion Modelling in Written Storiescited by 1
  24. 2023Utterance Emotion Dynamics in Children's Poems: Emotional Changes Across Agecited by 1
  25. 2024Once More, With Feeling: Measuring Emotion of Acting Performances in Contemporary American Filmcited by 1
  26. 2025Narrative Memory in Machines: Multi-Agent Arc Extraction in Serialized TVcited by 1
  27. 2025Continuous sentiment scores for literary and multilingual contextscited by 1
  28. 2026CascadeMind at SemEval-2026 Task 4: A Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Cascade for Narrative Similaritycited by 1
  29. 2026From Topic to Transition Structure: Unsupervised Concept Discovery at Corpus Scale via Predictive Associative Memorycited by 1
  30. 2026Narrative Flattening: How Post-Training Compresses Thematic, Affective, and Stylistic Variation in LLM Fictioncited by 1
  31. 2021Computational Paremiology: Charting the temporal, ecological dynamics of proverb use in books, news articles, and tweetscited by 0
  32. 2021Protagonists' Tagger in Literary Domain -- New Datasets and a Method for Person Entity Linkagecited by 0
  33. 2021Ousiometrics: The essence of meaning aligns with a power-danger-structure framework instead of valence-arousal-dominancecited by 0
  34. 2021Automatic Embedding of Stories Into Collections of Independent Mediacited by 0
  35. 2022Computational Storytelling and Emotions: A Surveycited by 0
  36. 2022On Narrative Information and the Distillation of Storiescited by 0
  37. 2024Good Books are Complex Matters: Gauging Complexity Profiles Across Diverse Categories of Perceived Literary Qualitycited by 0
  38. 2024Automatic Album Sequencingcited by 0

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