Fig. 2

Schematic of forward flow calculation. (a) Example story fragment used for forward flow analysis. Each arrow represents the semantic distance Di,j between word i and a preceding word j. Gray words are stop words removed during preprocessing. (b) Formula for computing forward flow71. For each word i, its instantaneous forward flow is calculated as the average semantic distance to all previous words (arrow values within the same color). The overall forward flow of the story is then determined by averaging these instantaneous values.