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

Does conflict improve story dialogue? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

While theorising on what makes a good story goes back over 1000 years, empirical research is more recent, and limited in extent. One almost universally held theory is that conflict improves stories. However, conflict is a broad and poorly conceptualised variable, and there is a dearth of empirical research into its effects on stories. Here we show that one specific form of conflict – conflictual dialogue – does not measurably improve ratings of story quality or how entertaining a story is. We used specially created stories, manipulated to create different levels of conflictual dialogue, in a repeated measures experiment. After the passage of dialogue, participants rated story quality and how entertaining they found the story. While the conflict manipulation was successful, is produced no significant difference in the rating of either quality or entertainment. However, the study may have been under-powered to find a small effect size. Despite the power issue, this study raises questions concerning whether conflict has a meaningful positive effect on the audience appreciation of conflictual dialogue, and may have wider implications for understanding the effects of conflict on stories