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Updated: Oct 8, 2025

Decomposing the Variance in Reading Comprehension to Reveal the Unique and Common Effects of Language and Decoding
Published on: October 11, 2018
Modelling social readers: novel tools for addressing reception from online book reviews
Pavan Holur1, Shadi Shahsavari1, Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh1
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Abstract:
Social reading sites offer an opportunity to capture a segment of readers' responses to literature, while data-driven analysis of these responses can provide new critical insight into how people 'read'. Posts discussing an individual book on the social reading site, Goodreads, are referred to as 'reviews', and consist of summaries, opinions, quotes or some mixture of these. Computationally modelling these reviews allows one to discover the non-professional discussion space about a work, including an aggregated summary of the work's plot, an implicit sequencing of various subplots and readers' impressions of main characters. We develop a pipeline of interlocking computational tools to extract a representation of this reader-generated shared narrative model. Using a corpus of reviews of five popular novels, we discover readers' distillation of the novels' main storylines and their sequencing, as well as the readers' varying impressions of characters in the novel. In so doing, we make three important contributions to the study of infinite-vocabulary networks: (i) an automatically derived narrative network that includes meta-actants; (ii) a sequencing algorithm, REV2SEQ, that generates a consensus sequence of events based on partial trajectories aggregated from reviews, and (iii) an 'impressions' algorithm, SENT2IMP, that provides multi-modal insight into readers' opinions of characters.
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