Where Do People Tell Stories Online? Story Detection Across Online Communities

Story detection in online communities is a challenging task as stories are scattered across communities and interwoven with non-storytelling spans within a single text. We address this challenge by building and releasing the StorySeeker toolkit, including a richly annotated dataset of 502 Reddit posts and comments, a detailed codebook adapted to the social media context, and models to predict storytelling at the document and span levels. Our dataset is sampled from hundreds of popular Englishlanguage Reddit communities ranging across 33 topic categories, and it contains fine-grained expert annotations, including binary story labels, story spans, and event spans. We evaluate a range of detection methods using our data, and we identify the distinctive textual features of online storytelling, focusing on storytelling spans. We illuminate distributional characteristics of storytelling on a large communitycentric social media platform, and we also conduct a case study on r/ChangeMyView, where storytelling is used as one of many persuasive strategies, illustrating that our data and models can be used for both inter-and intra-community research. Finally, we discuss implications of our tools and analyses for narratology and the study of online communities. * introductory text about the subreddit, why they're posting, etc. * questions about the story * explanations, discussion, hypotheses external to the story -Ask yourself: Is this text necessary if I were writing a summary of the story? • When highlighting the event spans: