Automatic Detection of Narrative Rhetorical Categories and Elements on Middle School Written Essays

Narrative essays enable students to express their thoughts and feelings, gain diverse perspectives, understand themselves and their world more deeply, and enhance their literary skills and cultural awareness. As such, it became a relevant textual production in educational settings. However, assessing these texts is challenging and time-intensive. Therefore, this study focuses on developing an automatic detection system for narrative structures in essays, using a range of natural language processing algorithms, including machine learning, deep learning, and large language models. The study found that BERT was more effective than other models for this task, highlighting GPT’s potential in extracting narrative structures. The findings of this study have implications for educational practices, particularly in the assessment and improvement of narrative writing skills among middle school students.