(It's hard to offer any help without a background in the the specific subfield of narrative studies, and with the complicated formal notations. It looks like it's essentially just counting things and establishing logical relationships between them, so trying it out with some pen-and-paper notes might help you to think through it, but that's my only advice. On the other hand, that's a conference paper, so the author must have presented slides at the conference: I wonder if you emailed them if they could give you the slides, which I hope would contain some examples. Understanding formal notation without any examples seems like too much to ask in my opinion.)