Planning Technologies for Interactive Storytelling

Since AI planning was first proposed for the task of narrative generation in interactive storytelling (IS), it has emerged as the dominant approach in this field. This chapter traces the use of planning technologies in this area, considers the core issues involved in the application of planning technologies in IS, and identifies some of the remaining challenges

A Narrative Sentence Planner and Structurer for Domain Independent, Parameterizable Storytelling

Storytelling is an integral part of daily life and a key part of how we share information and connect with others. The ability to use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to produce stories that are tailored and adapted to the individual reader could have large impact in many different applications. However, one reason that this has not become a reality to date is the NLG story gap, a disconnect between the plan-type representations that story generation engines produce, and the linguistic representations needed by NLG engines. Here we describe Fabula Tales, a storytelling system supporting both story generation and NLG. With manual annotation of texts from existing stories using an intuitive user interface, Fabula Tales automatically extracts the underlying story representation and its accompanying syntactically grounded representation. Narratological and sentence planning parameters are applied to these structures to generate different versions of the story. We show how our storytelling system can alter the story at the sentence level, as well as the discourse level. We also show that our approach can be applied to different kinds of stories by testing our approach on both Aesop’s Fables and first-person blogs posted on social media. The content and genre of such stories varies widely, supporting our claim that our approach is general and domain independent. We then conduct several user studies to evaluate the generated story variations and show that Fabula Tales’ automatically produced variations are perceived as more immediate, interesting, and correct, and are preferred to a baseline generation system that does not use narrative parameters

Exploring and explaining participation in local opposition: brown coal mining in Horní Jiřetín

This book summarizes a three-year research project on local opposition to coal mining in the Northwestern part of the Czech Republic. The research focused on the relational dimensions of the opposition movement and the political context in which the movement operates

Obstacles and Challenges affecting the move towards Universal Healthcare Coverage in Nigeria

There is increasing pressure for low and middle-income countries to move towards achieving universal healthcare coverage (UHC). According to WHO (2013), UHC guarantees the right to affordable health care for every individual, without financial hardship. The Director-General to the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan (WHO, 2010 p. 1), says UHC “is the single most powerful concept that public health has to offer”.In recent years, UHC has come onto the policy agenda, but Nigeria has been criticised for its slow progress. This study investigates why and how the UHC policy is developed by focusing on the roles and interactions of policy actors, their policy setting, and ‘how’ their actions influence the policy process and outcome of UHC so far in Nigeria. It will provide evidence of Nigeria’s policy process that will enhance the understanding of the politics of such health care policy implementation processes, which is fundamental to the success of policy networks of UHC in low- and middle-income settings.This is an empirical study using a mixed method approach involving quantitative and qualitative research components. The study combines the social network analysis (the quantitative component) with a more general policy process framework (the qualitative component). Data collected between March 2016 and February 2017 involved face-to-face structured interviews, face-to-face semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis to identify members of relevant policy networks and describe the pattern of relationships and influence within the UHC discourse.The SNA analysis displayed a full structural network taxonomy of the UHC policy process and identified key members of the UHC discourse into four key institutions and organisations- such as the power actors, peripheral actors, gatekeepers or brokers, isolated actors, and policy actors connected to the power actors.The theoretical policy process framework highlights five key gaps that exist as challenges and obstacles which impedes the implementation process of UHC Nigeria. These challenges and obstacles include, changing political climate, concerns about system capacity and finance, poor coordination between federal and state levels, corruption and problems with the private sector – HMOs. These challenges and obstacles limit the government’s ability to provide social and financial risk protection and access to quality health services to vulnerable Nigerian communities.Drawing on the theoretical framework and intervention, this thesis concludes that the political, policy, financial and organizational constraints of the health system limit UHC Nigeria implementation progress. Addressing the reasons why these issues ensue would be helpful in taking strategic steps towards achieving financial protection and access to basic health services through UHC for many Nigerians

Statistical language modelling for automatic story generation

This paper proposes an end-to-end Natural Language Generation approach to automatically create fiction stories using statistical language models. The proposed approach integrates the stages of macroplanning and the surface realisation, necessary to determine the content to write about together with the structure of the story, and the syntactic and lexical realisation of sentences to be generated, respectively. Moreover, the use of language models within the stages allows the generation task to be more flexible, as far as the adaptation of the approach to different languages, domains and textual genres is concerned. In order to validate our approach, two evaluations were performed. On the one hand, the influence of integrating position-specific language modelling in the macroplanning stage into the surface realisation module was evaluated. On the other hand, a user evaluation was performed to analyse the generated stories in a qualitative manner. Although there is still room for improvement, the results obtained from the first evaluation in conjunction with the user evaluation feedback shows that the combination of the aforementioned stages in an end-to-end approach is appropriate and have positive effects in the resulting generated text.This research work has been partially funded by the Generalitat Valenciana, through the grant ACIF/2016/501 and the project “DIIM2.0: Desarrollo de técnicas Inteligentes e Interactivas de Minería y generación de información sobre la web 2.0” (PROMETEOII/2014/001); by the Spanish Government through projects RESCATA (Representación canónica y transformaciones de los textos aplicado a las Tecnologías del Lenguaje Humano, Ref. TIN2015-65100-R) and REDES (Reconocimiento de Entidades Digitales: Enriquecimiento y Seguimiento, Ref TIN2015-65136-C2-2-R), as well as by Ayudas Fundación BBVA a equipos de investigación científica, through the project “Análisis de Sentimientos Aplicado a la Prevención del Suicidio en las Redes Sociales (ASAP)”

The Crisis Imperative: Crisis Rhetoric and Welfare State Reform in Belgium and the Netherlands in the Early 1990s

The Netherlands and Belgium exemplified the pathology of 'welfare without work' that characterized continental welfare states - until a political crisis in both countries produced a surprising divergence in scope and extent of policy change in the early 1990s. In Belgium, government announced major reforms but its social security arrangements proved remarkably resilient. In the Netherlands, policy makers announced and implemented unprecedented cutbacks and a major overhaul of the disability benefit administration and supervision. This book argues that reform is the product of the deliberate construction of a crisis as an imperative for change. It explains how crisis rhetoric resulted in drastic policy change in the Netherlands and in incremental change in Belgium.Nederland en België waren beiden het toonbeeld van 'welvaart zonder werk'. Beide landen kenden een hoge uitkeringsafhankelijkheid en een lage arbeidsparticipatie, totdat begin jaren negentig de 'politieke crisis' losbarstte. In België werd opgeroepen tot een 'Globaal Pakt' en een structurele herziening van het sociale zekerheidssysteem. De Belgische instituties bleken echter weerbarstig en veranderden nauwelijks. In Nederland werd drastisch gesneden in de uitkeringen, de Arbeidsongeschiktheidsverzekering en de corporatistische uitvoeringsstructuur werden ingrijpend gewijzigd. In deze unieke vergelijkende studie wordt onderzocht waarom vergelijkbare problemen in vergelijkbare landen leidden tot verschillende overheidsinterventies. Niet eerder werden Nederland en België op dit onderwerp met elkaar vergeleken. De verschillen in de hervormingen tussen beide landen worden verklaard vanuit de crisisretoriek die door politici werd gebruikt om structurele problemen aan te pakken en ingrijpende hervormingen door te drukken

Heterogeneous Inter-Organisational IT Innovation Creation: Institutional constraints in a public sector oriented market

This paper reports from a case study of an IT innovation consortium in the field of elderly home healthcare. The circumstance of the consortium we studied includes that it was comprised of small-to-medium sized enterprises and targeted a public sector oriented market. We present six institutional constraints facing the heterogeneous innovation collective in the innovation creation process: procurement boundary spanning, procurement tendering and contracts, operation boundary spanning, procurement rationales, market-driven development, development time misalignment. Three of these constraints have a high degree of novelty to the IS literature on innovation. Further, research focused on the field of IT for elderly home healthcare is addressing lack of widespread IT innovation diffusion by turning to user-centered design that emphasises user needs and usability evaluations. This sound approach needs to be complemented by studies that even more emphasise business conditions and commerciability evaluations at field-level; our study contributes in this regard