The Shmoop Corpus: A Dataset of Stories with Loosely Aligned Summaries

Understanding stories is a challenging reading comprehension problem for machines as it requires reading a large volume of text and following long-range dependencies. In this paper, we introduce the Shmoop Corpus: a dataset of 231 stories that are paired with detailed multi-paragraph summaries for each individual chapter (7,234 chapters), where the summary is chronologically aligned with respect to the story chapter. From the corpus, we construct a set of common NLP tasks, including Cloze-form question answering and a simplified form of abstractive summarization, as benchmarks for reading comprehension on stories. We then show that the chronological alignment provides a strong supervisory signal that learning-based methods can exploit leading to significant improvements on these tasks. We believe that the unique structure of this corpus provides an important foothold towards making machine story comprehension more approachable.