# Imagined versus Remembered Stories: Quantifying Differences in Narrative Flow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02662 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02662/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [All That's 'Human' Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00061/) (2021)
- [The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07772/) (2016)
- [Can Transformer Models Measure Coherence In Text? Re-Thinking the Shuffle Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03448/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [On the Horizon: Interactive and Compositional Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01714/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situations tend to unfold. Such knowledge of narrative event flow enables people to weave together a story. However, comparable computational tools to evaluate the flow of events in narratives are limited. We quantify the differences between autobiographical and imagined stories by introducing sequentiality, a measure of narrative flow of events, drawing probabilistic inferences from a cutting-edge large language model (GPT-3). Sequentiality captures the flow of a narrative by comparing the probability of a sentence with and without its preceding story context. We applied our measure to study thousands of diary-like stories, collected from crowdworkers about either a recent remembered experience or an imagined story on the same topic. The results show that imagined stories have higher sequentiality than autobiographical stories and that the sequentiality of autobiographical stories increases when the memories are retold several months later. In pursuit of deeper understandings of how sequentiality measures the flow of narratives, we explore proportions of major and minor events in story sentences, as annotated by crowdworkers. We find that lower sequentiality is associated with higher proportions of major events. The methods and results highlight opportunities to use cutting-edge computational analyses, such as sequentiality, on large corpora of matched imagined and autobiographical stories to investigate the influences of memory and reasoning on language generation processes.