A computer model that generates biography-like narratives (original) (raw)

Computational Approaches to Storytelling and Creativity

Ai Magazine, 2009

Cr eativity and storytelling are two ideas that one does not naturally associate with computers. Yet over the last few years there has been a surge of research efforts concerning the combination of both subjects. This article tries to shed light on these efforts. In carrying out this program, one is handicapped by the fact that, as words, both creativity and storytelling are severely lacking in the precision one expects of words to be used for intellectual endeavor. If a speaker were to mention either word in front of an audience, each person listening would probably come up with a different mental picture of what is intended. To avoid the risks that such vagueness might lead to, an initial effort is made here to restrict the endeavor to those aspects that have been modeled computationally in some model or system. The article then proceeds to review some of the research efforts that have addressed these problems from a computational point of view. The Creative Process Thinking of "creativity" evokes several ideas that seem to go together. It generally brings up the idea of someone generating something new. But it also has connotations that whatever is generated must be somewhat unexpected or different from what others might have produced. There is also an implicit restriction that what is generated satisfy some goal, though in many cases the particular goal implied is not altogether clear. The fact that someone is involved indicates we are reviewing an explicit action by some agent that we shall refer to as the creator. A sunset may generate a totally new combination of colors, possibly unexpected, but it would not be considered creative. The fact that something is generated indicates that the creative action Articles

Book Reviews: The creative process: A computer model of storytelling and creativity

1995

Within cognitive science and psychology, there has been a good deal of interest recently in the topic of creativity. In this book, Scott Turner of the University of California, Los Angeles, presents a theory of creativity applied to generating small stories. Turner can be thought of as a member of the third generation of the Schank family: first, of course, there was grandfather Roger Schank, who in the 1970s with Robert Abelson at Yale, embarked on the research project of understanding narrative text using the ideas of goals, plans, and scripts. The attempt was to propose computational models that would accomplish aspects of narrative understanding. The second generation was a talented group of people, including Wendy Lehnert and Robert Wilensky, who did their Ph.D.s at Yale on story understanding. Turner is a member of a third generation, advised by Michael Dyer who also obtained his Ph.D. at Yale and then moved to an academic position at UCLA. Dyer had turned his attention to sto...

The long path to narrative generation

IBM Journal of Research and Development

Narrative generation, understood as the task of constructing computational models of the way in which humans build stories, has been shown to involve a number of separate processes, related to different purposes to which it can be applied, and focusing on specific features that make stories valuable. The present paper reviews a set of story generation systems developed at the NIL research group, each focusing on different aspects and functions of stories. These systems provide an initial breakdown of how the term storytelling might be either instantiated or broken down into component processes. The systems cover functionalities such as: generating valid plot structures, simulating character's behaviours or the evolution of affinities between them, either reporting or fictionalising events observed in real life, and revising a story draft to maximise the suspense it induces in its readers. These functionalities are not intended to exhaust the set of possible operations involved in storytelling, but they constitute an initial set to understand the complexity of the task. The paper also includes two proposals-one theoretical and one technological-for understanding how a set of such functionalities might be composed into a broader operational process that produces more elaborate stories.

Three computer-based models of storytelling: BRUTUS, MINSTREL and MEXICA

Knowledge …, 2004

This paper attempts to establish criteria to analyse and evaluate computer models of creativity in writing. The paper provides a brief review of the antecedents of automatic story-generation and offers a proposal for the analysis and evaluation of computer models of creativity in writing. It reviews three major projects to develop computer-based storywriters published between 1993 and 2000 and analyses their approach, similarities, differences and contributions. It compares the three approaches and discusses implications for the modelling of creativity in writing and the design of future story generation systems.

Creativity in Story Generation From the Ground Up: Non-deterministic Simulation driven by Narrative

Creativity in narrative requires a careful management of knowledge but story generation systems focusing on creativity have typically circumvented this level of detail by using high level descriptions of events and relations. While this has proven effective for plot generation, narrative generation can be drastically enriched with a grounded representation of actions based on low level simulation. This level of detail and robust knowledge representation can form the basis for a conceptual space exploration driven by narrative knowledge, namely by guiding non-deterministic generation of successive simulation states composing a story. This paper presents and updated version of the story generation system STellA that implements this hybrid model, along with results and discussion on the relative benefits of the described approach.

Character Focused Narrative Models for Computational Storytelling

Proceedings of the Thirteenth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2017

My thesis aims at conceptualizing and implementing a computational model of narrative generation that is informed by narratological theory as well as cognitive multi-agent simulation models. It approaches this problem by taking a mimetic stance towards fictional characters and investigates how narrative phenomena related to characters can be computationally recreated from a deep character model grounded in multi agent systems. Based on such a conceptu-alization of narrative it explores how the generation of plot can be controlled, and how the quality of the resulting plot can be evaluated, in dependence of fictional characters. By that it contributes to research on computational creativity by implementing an evaluative storytelling system, and to nar-ratology by proposing a generative narrative theory based on several post-structuralist descriptive theories.

A guided journey through non-interactive automatic story generation

arXiv (Cornell University), 2021

We present a literature survey on non-interactive computational story generation. The article starts with the presentation of requirements for creative systems, three types of models of creativity (computational, socio-cultural, and individual), and models of human creative writing. Then it reviews each class of story generation approach depending on the used technology: story-schemas, analogy, rules, planning, evolutionary algorithms, implicit knowledge learning, and explicit knowledge learning. Before the concluding section, the article analyses the contributions of the reviewed work to improve the quality of the generated stories. This analysis addresses the description of the story characters, the use of narrative knowledge including about character believability, and the possible lack of more comprehensive or more detailed knowledge or creativity models. Finally, the article presents concluding remarks in the form of suggestions of research topics that might have a significant impact on the advancement of the state of the art on autonomous non-interactive story generation systems. The article concludes that the autonomous generation and adoption of the main idea to be conveyed and the autonomous design of the creativity ensuring criteria are possibly two of most important topics for future research.

Reviewing Propp’s Story Generation Procedure in the Light of Computational Creativity

Vladimir Propp's analysis of Russian folk tales is known to have produced a semi-formal description of the structure of these tales that has acted as inspiration for several story generation systems, both sequential and interactive. Its exhaustive description of the constituent elements of tales of this kind, and the enumeration of the patterns they follow provided a very useful starting point for researchers looking for computational implementations of story generators. However, it is less generally known that in his book Propp also proposed a procedure for the generation of new tales based on his analytical framework. Although this generative procedure is much less formal than its analytical counterpart, it is one of the first existing instances of a creative process described procedurally. Of particular interest for the field of creative story generation is the number of issues that are declared relevant but not explored in detail. The present paper revisits Propp's description and focuses on the task of generating the sequence of character functions that determine the plot of the tale. For this task, a number of possible computational implementations are explored, in search for those that produce better results in terms of a number of simple evaluation metrics inspired by Propp's formalism.

A survey on story generation techniques for authoring computational narratives

IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 2016

Computers are often used as tools to design, implement and even visualize a variety of narrative forms. Many researchers and artists are now further attempting to engage the computer actively throughout the development of the narrative itself. Any form of computational narrative authoring is at some level always mixed-initiative, meaning that the processing capabilities of the computer are utilized with a varying degree to automate certain features of the authoring process. We structure this survey by focusing on two key components of stories, plot and space, and more specifically the degree to which these are either automated by the computer or authored manually. By examining the successes of existing research, we identify potential new research directions in the field of computational narrative. We also identify the advantages of developing a standard model of narrative to allow for collaboration between plot and space automation techniques. This would likely benefit the field of automated space generation with the strengths in the field of automated plot generation.