Folktale story generation and automatic evaluation of generated text

Abstract

December 2024School of ScienceFolktales, as cultural narratives originating from oral traditions, simultaneously entertain and educateindividuals. These indigenous tales, deeply rooted in societal contexts and imbued with moral lessons, provide invaluable insights into the customs and traditions of the communities responsible for their creation and transmission across generations. Consequently, folktales possess historical and literary importance, making them ideal tools for fostering understanding and promoting cultural exchange among diverse cultures. Remarkably, folktales from various societies frequently exhibit striking similarities, highlighting the interconnectedness of human experiences across the globe. Folklore researchers have meticulously analyzed and classified folktales based on types and motifs to identify shared themes and characteristics. Nonetheless, the automatic identification and discovery of folktale types remain an area of ongoing study, and little work has focused on automatic folktale classification and clustering. The research presented here has three distinct contributions: addressing the challenges associated with automatically recognizing folktale plot types and motifs to cluster tales, generating narratives conforming to one or more established folktale types, and evaluating the produced text with regard to the plot type and a holistic measure of quality. This research lays the foundation for valuable applications in diverse fields, including information retrieval, persuasive communication, negotiation strategies, natural language comprehension, and computational creativity. Additionally, the capacity to abstract natural language semantics could be crucial in various cognitive tasks, and this study offers insights into these fundamental processes. Lastly, this research advances a computational perspective on cultural influences, enabling the exploration of cultural distinctions as they manifest within narratives.Ph