  Events in a narrative differ in salience: some are more important to the
story than others. Estimating event salience is useful for tasks such as story
generation, and as a tool for text analysis in narratology and folkloristics.
To compute event salience without any annotations, we adopt Barthes' definition
of event salience and propose several unsupervised methods that require only a
pre-trained language model. Evaluating the proposed methods on folktales with
event salience annotation, we show that the proposed methods outperform
baseline methods and find fine-tuning a language model on narrative texts is a
key factor in improving the proposed methods.
