We have examined a large number of children's stories for use as data. Among them are two major collections of stories, which are used for development and evaluation purposes. The children's stories by Hans Christian Andersen and works by Lewis Carroll (focusing mainly on Alice in Wonderland). Works from these two authors are selected because of their stylistic diversity, as well as their contrasting writing styles, which is useful for testing the performance flexibility of ESPER. Note that for our development/testing corpus, we hand-selected stories with an above average number of quoted speech segments.