ProppML: A Complete Annotation Scheme for Proppian Morphologies

We give a preliminary description of ProppML, an annotation scheme designed to capture all the components of a Proppian-style morphological analysis of narratives. This work represents the first fully complete annotation scheme for Proppian morphologies, going beyond previous annotation schemes such as PftML, ProppOnto, Bod et al., and our own prior work. Using ProppML we have annotated Propp\u27s morphology on fifteen tales (18,862 words) drawn from his original corpus of Russian folktales. This is a significantly larger set of data than annotated in previous studies. This pilot corpus was constructed via double annotation by two highly trained annotators, whose annotations were then combined after discussion with a third highly trained adjudicator, resulting in gold standard data which is appropriate for training machine learning algorithms. Agreement measures calculated between both annotators show very good agreement (F_1>0.75, kappa>0.9 for functions; F_1>0.6 for moves; and F_1>0.8, kappa>0.6 for dramatis personae). This is the first robust demonstration of reliable annotation of Propp\u27s system