Knowledge Representation Technologies for Narratives, Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

This paper describes the conceptual tools that, in an NKRL context (NKRL = Narrative Knowledge Representation Language), allow us to obtain a (computer-usable) description of full narratives as logically-structured associations of the constituting (and duly formalized) elementary events. These conceptual tools must then be able to formalize those connectivity phenomena – denoted, at surface linguistic level, by logico-semantic coherence links like causality, goal, co-ordination, subordination, indirect speech etc. – which assure the conceptual unity of the whole narrative. The unification-based solutions adopted in this context like, e.g., completive construction and binding occurrences, allow us to take into account the connectivity phenomena by reifying the formal representations used to model the constitutive elementary events.