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Implicit Messages of Narratives and Evaluative Text Structures: A Network-Based Approach Cover

Implicit Messages of Narratives and Evaluative Text Structures: A Network-Based Approach

By:   
Open Access
|Jan 2026

Figures & Tables

Figure 1

NP- and clause-evaluation from Kleist‘s “The Earthquake in Chili”, INCEpTION text-annotation environment. My transl: 1) “The young sinner was brought, regardless of her condition”; 2) “She walked bravely from street to street with her booty, removing the misery from her chest.” (The irony tag is by default “-“ [false] and can be used to mark ironic evaluations or encodings.)

Figure 2

Literary encodings from Thomas Mann’s “With the Prophet”, Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” and Joseph Roth’s “The Silent Prophet”, INCEpTION text-annotation environment. My transl: 1) “He wore a frock coat and gloves, determined to behave as if he were in church.” Might that which is claimed about the “suicides” in the Steppenwolf book be this way or another, no one could deny me the pleasure to spare myself, with the help of carbon gas, razorblade or pistol, the repetition of a process the bitter pain of which I have truly had to suffer frequently and deeply.” 2) “He saw the theaters, on whose stages a piece of life is portrayed pointedly and cut into acts by people in pink make-up, against Entree.”

Figure 3

Example of a value opposition from Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chili”, INCEpTION text-annotation environment. My transl.: “here was a courageous savior trying to help; here stood another, pale as death, stretching speechless, trembling hands to the sky.”

Table 1

Descriptive statistics of annotation corpus.

nTOKENS
Texts3577068
Literary evaluations224925309
Literary encodings55510906
Oppositions287917
Table 2

Inter-annotator agreement based on 35 (for evaluations) respectively 32 texts (for encodings).

γ
Literary evaluations0.53
Literary encodings0.22
Table 3

Inter-annotator agreement, Krippendorff’s alpha for ordinal scales.

Assertive Force
How sure are you that the text conveys an implicit message? (0 – very uncertain; 10 – very certain)
0.45
Assertive Clarity
How sure are you exactly what the implicit message of the text is? (0 – very uncertain; 10 – very certain)
0.50
Figure 4

Evaluative text structure in relation to characters in Kleist’s “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (“The Earthquake in Chili); character level (blue), narrator level (orange), text organization level (green); evaluations represented by simple arrows in grey, encodings by simple arrows in color, and oppositions by double-sided arrows in grey.

Figure 5

Directed Single-layer Network of Kleist’s “Das Erdbeben in Chili” (“The Earthquake in Chili”). Blue – negative evaluation, Green – positive evaluation, Orange – opposition.

Figure 6

Evaluative structure of Thea Dorn’s “Vorsicht Steinschlag” (“Danger Falling Stones”). Blue – negative evaluation, Green – positive evaluation, Orange – opposition.

Figure 7

Evaluative structure of Robert Walser’s “Der Nachen” (“The Bark”). Blue – negative evaluation, Green – positive evaluation, Orange – opposition.

Figure 8

Evaluative structure of Hollenstein’s “Gelb wie eine Zitrone” (“Yellow Like a Lemon”) (excerpt). Blue – negative evaluation, Green – positive evaluation, Orange – opposition.

Figure 9

Evaluative structure of Bachmann’s “Auch ich habe in Arkadien gelebt” (“I Too Have Lived in Arcadia”) (excerpt). Blue – negative evaluation, Green – positive evaluation, Orange – opposition.

Figure 10

t-SNE of Network Clusters Based on Portrait Divergence.

Table 4

Classification results for assertive clarity (LOW vs. HIGH). P – Precision (how many predicted positives are actually correct), R – Recall (How many actual positives were correctly found), F1 – F1-Score (balance between precision and recall (their harmonic mean).

PRF1SUPPORT
LOW0.860.380.5216
HIGH0.620.940.7417
accuracy0.670.670.670.67
macro avg0.740.660.6333
weighted avg0.730.670.6433
Table 5

Classification results for assertive force (LOW vs. HIGH). P – Precision, R – Recall, F1 – F1-Score.

PRF1SUPPORT
LOW0.000.000.0010
HIGH0.701.000.8223
accuracy0.700.700.700.70
macro avg0.350.500.4133
weighted avg0.490.700.5733
Figure 11

Hierarchical Clustering based on Annotation Based and Global Network Features, “LOW” and “HIGH” refer to assertive clarity.

Table 6

Evaluation of Hierarchical Clustering based on Annotation Based and Global Network Features, “LOW” and “HIGH” refer to assertive clarity. ). P – Precision, R – Recall, F1 – F1-Score.

PRF1SUPPORT
LOW0.810.940.8718
HIGH0.930.760.8417
accuracy0.860.860.860.86
macro avg0.870.850.8635
weighted avg0.870.860.8635
Figure 12

Average Feature Values for Hierarchical Clustering, assertive clarity.

Figure 13

Triad types 021C, 120D and 021U, among most prominent features in Hierarchical Clustering.13

Figure 14

Hierarchical Clustering based on Annotation Based and Global Network Features, “LOW” and “HIGH” refer to assertive force.

Table 7

Evaluation of Hierarchical Clustering based on Annotation Based and Global Network Features, “LOW” and “HIGH” refer to assertive force. P – Precision, R – Recall, F1 – F1-Score.

PRF1SUPPORT
LOW1.000.500.6712
HIGH0.791.000.8823
accuracy0.830.830.830.83
macro avg0.900.750.7835
weighted avg0.860.830.8135
Figure 15

Average Feature Values for Hierarchical Clustering, assertive force

A1

Narratological Text Types.

DOCUMENT TITLETYPE
Aichinger_Das_Fenstertheater.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Altenberg_Die_Natur.txt
Auerbach_Der_Kindesmord.txtdisposition-outcome
Bachmann_Arkadien.txtfeature contrast & value contrast; subverted contrast
Bierbaum_Der_Mohr.txtfeature contrast; satirical
Bobrowski_Brief_aus_Amerika.txtfeature contrast
Böll_Wanderer_kommst_du_nach_Spa.txtdisposition-outcome
Brecht_Herr_Keuner_und_die_Schauspielerin.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Brecht_Müllers_natürliche_Haltung.txt
Dorn_Vorsicht_Steinschlag.txtfeature contrast
Franck_Streuselschnecke.txt
Grimm_Aschenputtel.txtdisposition-outcome; feature contrast & value contrast
Grimm_Das_tapfere_Schneiderlein.txtdisposition-outcome
Grimm_Frau_Holle.txtdisposition-outcome; feature contrast & value contrast
Grün_Liebe.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Hebel_Unverhofftes_Wiedersehen.txt
Heckmann_Das_Henkersmahl.txtsubverted contrast
Hesse_Der_Steppenwolf_Beginn.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Heym_Die_Sektion.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Hollenstein_Gelb_wie_eine_Zitrone.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Kafka_Bericht_für_eine_Akademie.txtfeature contrast & value contrast; subverted contrast
Kafka_Der_neue_Advokat.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Kleist_Chili.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Langgässer_Die_Sippe_auf_dem_Berg_und_im_Tal.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Löns_Die_beiden_Höfe.txtfeature contrast; disposition-outcome
Mann_Beim_Propheten.txtsatirical
Mann_Der_Geburtstag_der_Frau_Baronin.txtfeature contrast; satirical
Reventlow_Der_feine_Dieb.txt
Roth_Der_stumme_Prophet_Fragment.txt
Stamm_Das_schönste_Mädchen.txtfeature contrast
Storm_Im_Saal.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
Tucholsky_Märchen.txtsatirical
Walser_Der_Nachen.txtfeature contrast
Wendt_Tote_Vögel.txt
Wolf_Der_Stern_der_Schönheit.txtfeature contrast & value contrast
A2

List of Features used in Lasso Regression.

ANNOTATION BASED FEATURESNETWORK FEATURES
  • narrator evaluations

  • character evaluations

  • evaluations organization level

  • value oppositions

  • encoding oppositions

  • feature oppositions

  • positive evaluations

  • negative evaluations

  • overlapping oppositions

  • explicit evaluations

  • implicit evaluations

  • evaluative difference of contrastive entities

  • number of strongly connected components

  • number of weakly connected components

  • hub score

  • authority score

  • out-degree max

  • in-degree variance

  • out-degree variance

  • reciprocity

  • density

  • transitivity

  • triad 003

  • triad 012

  • triad 102

  • triad 021D

  • triad 021U

  • triad 021C

  • triad 111D

  • triad 111U

  • triad 030T

  • triad 030C

  • triad 201

  • triad 120D

  • triad 120U

  • triad 120C

  • triad 210

  • triad 300

DOI: https://doi.org/10.61645/ssol.207 | Journal eISSN: 2210-4380
Language: English
Page range: 1 - 21
Submitted on: Jul 28, 2025
Accepted on: Nov 11, 2025
Published on: Jan 6, 2026
Published by: International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

© 2026 Benjamin Gittel, published by International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.