Objectivity and reproducibility of formal narrative representations or annotations: Propp's functions & narrative summarization Alexander Block, Rens Bod, Bernhard Fisseni, Adil Kurji, Carlos León, Benedikt Löwe, Deniz Sarikaya Abstract: Formal narrative representation is a procedure assigning a formal description to a natural language narrative. In general, it is a human procedure, and one of the goals of "computational models of narrative" is to understand this procedure better in order to automatise it. In order to be automatisable, a formal framework should allow for objective and reproducible representations. In this paper, we present empirical work focussing on objectivity and reproducibility of the Proppian framework and the hypothesis that narrative formalisation is summarisation. The first two experiments consider Propp's formalisation of Russian fairy tales; the third compares these results to summaries of the same stories. The data show that some features of Propp's system such as the assignment of the characters to the dramatis personae and some of the functions are difficult to reproduce; furthermore, natural summaries of folktales do not match the Proppian functions.