A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives <s> A. Plot Template and Manual Space <s> The Sfudy Of Man, 30%. I {€§?2}; $28-$53; gnxm‘ ENS? C0 Structural Cospiexity is Fairy isles George P. Lakof£* PREFACE This is an inquiry into the structure of discourse through the investigation of an interesting subset of discourses ~~ Russian Fairy Tales. I assume that the study of discourse is ultimately to be part of a formalized theory of linguistic structure. I“sha11 endeavor to show that any adequate theory of the structure of fairy tales must share many formal properties with the transformational linguistic theory that has so far been prooosed by Noam Chomsky and his cow workers. Such a result would be of psychological interest, for it would indicate that an adequate model for the bearer and speaker of the sentences of a language could also be used to describe§ at least in part, the human ability to produce and understand discoursesa This might ultimately Show that the human mind is an extremely efficient device which uses essentially the same mechanism for constructing and undersiasding complicateﬁ discourses as it uses for constructing and understanding iadivieual seetencesg %This paper was sriteee is i§§e while my zemoze escestozg George P? Lakoffr was s graduate siudeet at Eeeiaaa Eniversityr 1 tree: that that eponymoss wozthy would tske it as so eisservice test I as angels to find myself is total agreement sow with shat he wrote then; though there is e certsie selsacholy pleasureﬁ E own, in rewreeeisg even those eassages where we most iiﬁferr ~=~§eorge Laksff, ﬁniversity of California? Eeskeleso <s> BIB001 </s> A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives <s> A. Plot Template and Manual Space <s> This is a partial generative grammar of covert but empirically discoverable narrative elements. The grammar is a theory which seeks to account for base narrative sequences in well-formed North Alaskan Eskimo folktales. The narrative elements are hierarchically organized into a categorial component with both context free and context sensitive rules. The theory claims some replicability and predictive power. FOLK NARRATIVE has resisted the dis <s> BIB002 </s> A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives <s> A. Plot Template and Manual Space <s> Abstract A number of current theories of story understanding are based on the idea of a mentally embodied story grammar. Recent discussions of the adequacy of such theories have been inconclusive. In this paper it is argued that story grammarians have omitted to specify their theories in sufficient detail, and both they and their critics have, therefore, failed to notice certain fundamental inadequacies in those theories. In particular, there has been little discussion of how story structures are computed, and it has not been noted that stories cannot be parsed in the same way as sentences. The reason is that there can be no finite lexicon of story elements containing information about the node categories to which those elements belong. No alternative suggestions about the computation of story structure have been made. A different account of story comprehension is outlined, which dispenses with the parallel between sentence processing and story processing, and which assumes that almost none of the stored knowledge used in story understanding is specific to stories. <s> BIB003 </s> A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives <s> A. Plot Template and Manual Space <s> Abstract Story grammar was a fairly hot topic in artificial intelligence (AI) from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Now, however, it has virtually disappeared as a research issue in AI. The process of science is one where theories are proposed, experiments are conducted, hypotheses are tested, theories are revised and, ultimately, theories are either accepted or rejected. The story grammar story is surveyed with a view towards describing what it was, and explaining what happened to it, from the perspective of the scientific process. <s> BIB004 </s> A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives <s> A. Plot Template and Manual Space <s> Few attempts have yet been made to implement a story engine for guiding interactive drama. Most of them rely on the computer’s ability to generate the story in full detail. By focusing on story guidance at the level of morphological functions as defined by Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, we take a different approach. We do not attempt to provide a model for generating stories in detail. Instead, we expect human authors to create specific interactive scenarios for each function in advance. Our primary concerns are high-level guidance of plot, as well as finding the best compromise between author input and machine generation. By providing access to the story model itself, we allow authors to control the story at all levels of detail. Our first prototype features a wide variety of plots being generated from a limited number of scenes. <s> BIB005 </s> A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives <s> A. Plot Template and Manual Space <s> Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in art and entertainment, enabling rich and deeply interactive experiences. At the same time as AI opens up new fields of artistic expression, AI-based art itself becomes a fundamental research agenda, posing and answering novel research questions that would not be raised unless doing AI research in the context of art and entertainment. I call this agenda, in which AI research and art mutually inform each other, Expressive AI. Expressive AI takes seriously the problem of building intelligences that robustly function outside of the lab, engaging human participants in intellectually and aesthetically satisfying interactions, which, hopefully, teach us something about ourselves. ::: This thesis describes a specific AI-based art piece, an interactive drama called Facade, and describes the practice of Expressive AI, using Facade, as well as additional AI-based artwork described in the appendices, as case studies. ::: An interactive drama is a dramatically interesting virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, within which the player experiences a story from a first person perspective. Over the past decade, there has been a fair amount of research into believable agents, that is, autonomous characters exhibiting rich personalities, emotions, and social interactions. There has been comparatively little work, however, exploring how the local, reactive behavior of believable agents can be integrated with the more global, deliberative nature of a story plot, so as to build interactive, dramatic worlds. This thesis presents Facade, the first published interactive drama system that integrates character (believable agents), story (drama management) and shallow natural language processing into a complete system. Facade will be publicly released as a free download in 2003. ::: In the Facade architecture, the unit of plot/character integration is the dramatic beat. In the theory of dramatic writing, beats are the smallest unit of dramatic action, consisting of a short dialog exchange or small amount of physical action. As architectural entities, beats organize both the procedural knowledge to accomplish the beat's dramatic action, and the declarative knowledge to sequence the beat in an evolving plot. Instead of conceiving of the characters as strongly autonomous entities that coordinate to accomplish dramatic action through purely local decision-making, characters are instead weakly autonomous—the character's behavioral repertoire dynamically changes as beats are sequenced. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) <s> BIB006 </s> A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives <s> A. Plot Template and Manual Space <s> This paper deals with interactive storytelling for games. The principle used in narration is based on Campbell's heroes journey. The paper begins by introducing Campbell analysis and then presents how this model has been transformed in a pattern for interactive storytelling. Then, it shows how this model can be used for educational games. Finally an experimentation is presented showing an implementation of this interactive storytelling in the field of a game using a robot. <s> BIB007
The vision that plot generally obeys fixed structures and is guided by inherent rules has guided many researchers to develop some form of plot grammar. Historically, the development of a general story grammar was intended to determine the mental structures used by humans to reconstruct stories from plot fragments, and how stories were stored in the brain BIB004 . While the story grammar approach was criticized BIB003 ,  and eventually abandoned from the psychological point of view, it became of interest to those wishing to construct a plot generation tool, as a plot grammar is defined in a strictly formal fashion, with a clear division between plot and rules for structuring plot, and is easy to automate with a computer. An early and classic structural definition for Russian folktales was proposed by Propp  . Within Propp's work, he breaks down the Russian folktale into 31 sequential functions describing specific events in the plot and seven key roles, relating to the character stereotypes such as the hero, villain, etc. While not explicitly a grammar, Propp's functions were eventually used by Lakoff BIB001 in the construction of a plot grammar, which used rewrite rules to generate a plot. A rewrite rule consists of a symbol and a symbol expansion. Applying a rewrite rule typically consists of searching a given structure (e.g., a string or graph) for an occurrence of the symbol (e.g., a substring or subgraph); if found, the symbol is rewritten using the symbol expansion. For Lakoff, this involved representing a plot as a string, with Propp's functions being represented as a set of rewrite rules. The building of the plot thus occurs by progressively applying any one of the valid rewrite rules until the folktale is complete. The folktale structure and concept of narrative functions remains a popular topic within the research community and a decent summary of several such systems may be found in the survey by Cavazza and Pizzi  . Grasbon and Braun used Propp's morphology in the construction of an authoring tool for IF BIB005 . In this tool, the author manually creates segments of a narrative for each of the functions defined by Propp. The tool then generates IF stories guided by the rules of Propp's grammar. Lakoff's grammar and Grasbon and Braun's engine show two different approaches to the automation of plot. While both systems rely on the same underlying structure, the first approach fully automates the plot, while the second approach tackles the challenges of creating interactive narrative experiences by guiding the player along a certain story path. This approach is often called a drama manager  , BIB006 , which refers to regulating certain features of an interactive story during a play-through, such as suspense or drama, or even generating new content to help structure the interaction into a more coherent narrative experience. Champagnat et al. created an interactive storytelling system using Campbell's Hero's Journey to create a generalized plot grammar, which could be customized to fit various stories BIB007 . Similarly to Grasbon and Braun's work, the author must manually create content for each of the stages in the Hero's Journey, with the computer mainly being responsible for generating the high-level plot structure. Colby developed a noteworthy grammar, focused specifically on aboriginal folktales BIB002 . Colby's grammar is contrasted with Propp's structure in that rather than defining a strict sequence of events, Colby's grammar created a string consisting of three main categories of events, motivation, engagement, and resolution. The initial rendering of plot consists of a string representing a sequence of these events, which are generated according to a set of rewrite rules. The final generation step is then to assign a specific event (called an eidon) to each event category. Colby's push away from Propp's imposed sequential structure allows for more unique and varied plot structures, not necessarily by needing to create more events, but by using a system which does not enforce an ordering on events.