Quantitative Characteristics of Human-Written Short Stories as a Metric for Automated Storytelling

Evaluating the extent to which computer-produced stories are structured like human-invented narratives can be an important component of the quality of a story plot. In this paper, we report on an empirical experiment in which human subjects have invented short plots in a constrained scenario. The stories were annotated according to features commonly found in existing automatic story generators. The annotation was designed to measure the proportion and relations of story components that should be used in automatic computational systems for matching human behaviour. Results suggest that there are relatively common patterns that can be used as input data for identifying similarity to human-invented stories in automatic storytelling systems. The found patterns are in line with narratological models, and the results provide numerical quantification and layout of story components. The proposed method of story analysis is tested over two additional sources, the ROCStories corpus and stories generated by automated storytellers, to illustrate the valuable insights that may be derived from them

A Planning-based Approach for Music Composition

. Automatic music composition is a fascinating field within computational creativity. While different Artificial Intelligence techniques have been used for tackling this task, Planning – an approach for solving complex combinatorial problems which can count on a large number of high-performance systems and an expressive language for describing problems – has never been exploited. In this paper, we propose two different techniques that rely on automated planning for generating musical structures. The structures are then filled from the bottom with “raw” musical materials, and turned into melodies. Music experts evaluated the creative output of the system, acknowledging an overall human-enjoyable trait of the melodies produced, which showed a solid hierarchical structure and a strong musical directionality. The techniques proposed not only have high relevance for the musical domain, but also suggest unexplored ways of using planning for dealing with non-deterministic creative domains

Imaginative Recall with Story Intention Graphs

Intelligent storytelling systems either formalize specific narrative structures proposed by narratologists (such as Propp and Bremond), or are founded on formal representations from artificial intelligence (such as plan structures from classical planning). This disparity in underlying knowledge representations leads to a lack of common evaluation metrics across story generation systems, particularly around the creativity aspect of generators. This paper takes Skald, a reconstruction of the Minstrel creative story generation system, and maps the representation to a formal narrative representation of Story Intention Graphs (SIG) proposed by Elson et al. This mapping facilitates the opportunity to expand the creative space of stories generated through imaginative recall in Minstrel while maintaining narrative complexity. We show that there is promise in using the SIG as an intermediate representation that is useful for evaluation of story generation systems

Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

AUTOMATED LYRICAL NARRATIVE WRITING

Computational Creativity studies the potential of computers to act as autonomous creators and co-creators in addition to tools helping people. Creativity is evident in music, visual art, problem solving and languages. Significant work has been conducted in the area of linguistic creation mainly in the generation of stories, puns, rhymes, jokes, similes, and poetry. One of the major challenges of computational creativity is to generate lyrics that exhibit human-level creativity. On one hand, the lyrics generated should be meaningful and coherent, while on the other hand, they should satisfy poetry constraints such as rhyme scheme, rhyme type, and the number of syllables. The goal of this project is to combine the two art forms of storytelling and lyrics writing through the automated creation of coherent lyrics. The project also highlights the approaches to the creation of poetry and lyrics. The resulting model is named MexicA’s BaLlad MachinE (MABLE). This is the first computational system that generates narrative-based lyrics