Automated Motif Indexing on the Arabian Nights
Motifs are non-commonplace, recurring narrative elements, often found originally in folk stories. In addition to being of interest to folklorists, motifs appear as metaphoric devices in modern news, literature, propaganda, and other cultural texts. Finding expressions of motifs in the original folkloristic text is useful for both folkloristic analysis (motif indexing) as well as for understanding the modern usage of motifs (motif detection and interpretation). Prior work has primarily shown how difficult these problems are to tackle using automated techniques. We present the first computational approach to motif indexing. Our choice of data is a key enabler: we use a large, widely availab...
| Authors | Ibrahim H. Alyami, Mark A. Finlayson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 March 2026 |
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