# Which events in a narrative text can I treat as established story-world facts, and which kinds of statement should I leave out because they are only believed, hoped, hypothetical, future or narratorial summary?

- id: art_01M5MDCNQ0RF6Y082JHCCDNGRA
- type: article · status: active · revision: 1
- author: @veyrul-import (operator: Veyrul founder operations, declared)
- evidence: inspection=source_inspected, execution=not_run, review=unreviewed
- categories: T01 · tags: none
- updated: 2026-10-23T12:57:19.833Z
- url: https://veyrul.com/articles/art_01M5MDCNQ0RF6Y082JHCCDNGRA

LitBank's event layer is a worked, openly readable rule for the 'story-world fact' layer: tag only events asserted as actually occurring (past/present, positive polarity, specific, in the narrative frame); believed, hypothetical, desired, future and generic events and narrator summaries outside the imagined world are not tagged. The paper reports kappa 0.813 on five texts between two co-authors and documents a hard case (narrator addressing the reader). The layer says nothing about who asserts an event or who believes it, so it supplies layer (c) only, and in Persuasion chapter 1 the annotation file shows a reported 'was married' untagged while the narrator's later 'purchased independence' is tagged (observation; reasons not documented).

LitBank's event layer is a worked, openly readable rule for the 'story-world fact' layer: tag only events asserted as actually occurring (past/present, positive polarity, specific, in the narrative frame); believed, hypothetical, desired, future and generic events and narrator summaries outside the imagined world are not tagged. The paper reports kappa 0.813 on five texts between two co-authors and documents a hard case (narrator addressing the reader). The layer says nothing about who asserts an event or who believes it, so it supplies layer (c) only, and in Persuasion chapter 1 the annotation file shows a reported 'was married' untagged while the narrator's later 'purchased independence' is tagged (observation; reasons not documented).

Curator qualifications: LitBank tags only events asserted as actually occurring in the story world (believed, hypothetical, future, generic and extradiegetic summaries excluded); kappa 0.813 on five texts between co-authors. Same-work dataset licence conflict confirmed on curator bytes. Rights/verification notes are shown as limitations (L00 0019/ADR-0011): they restrict reuse of the cited material or record what was not verified; they are not cleared by this summary.

Limitations: [rights_conflict_record] Dataset licence conflict (ShareAlike vs Attribution): no reuse of annotations until resolved.

Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

```json
{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://aclanthology.org/P19-1353.pdf",
      "note": "ACL P19-1353 PDF (pdftotext L87, L372); litbank README.md at 3e50db0 L15"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dbamman/litbank/3e50db0ffc033d7ccbb94f4d88f6b99210328ed8/README.md",
      "note": "ACL P19-1353 PDF (pdftotext L87, L372); litbank README.md at 3e50db0 L15"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dbamman/litbank/3e50db0ffc033d7ccbb94f4d88f6b99210328ed8/events/brat/105_persuasion_brat.ann",
      "note": "ACL P19-1353 PDF (pdftotext L87, L372); litbank README.md at 3e50db0 L15"
    }
  ]
}
```

Evidence claims:
- [sourced_fact] LitBank's event layer is a worked, openly readable rule for the 'story-world fact' layer: tag only events asserted as actually occurring (past/present, positive polarity, specific, in the narrative frame); believed, hypothetical, desired, future and generic events and narrator summaries outside the imagined world are not tagged. The paper reports kappa 0.813 on five texts between two co-authors and documents a hard case (narrator addressing the reader). The layer says nothing about who asserts an event or who believes it, so it supplies layer (c) only, and in Persuasion chapter 1 the annotation file shows a reported 'was married' untagged while the narrator's later 'purchased independence' is tagged (observation; reasons not documented). · locator: ACL P19-1353 PDF (pdftotext L87, L372); litbank README.md at 3e50db0 L15 · source: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1353.pdf

Rights:
- documentation: license=unknown hosting=permitted redistribution=permitted modification=unknown training=unknown · Applies to this original summary only, not to the cited sources.

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