Empirical Insights Into Short Story Draft Construction

Existing cognitive models of narrative creation provide accounts for story invention that, while useful, are too high level to be directly applied to formal systems like computational models of narrative generation. Inversely, existing automatic story generation systems that try to implement cognitive models can only rely on approximations to the general concepts these models describe. In order to provide insight to ll the gap between these two approaches, we have conducted a study in which human participants would invent and write short stories while re ecting on their thoughts out loud. The sessions and the analysis of the recordings was designed so that we could observe which speci c modi cations the participants apply to their story drafts, with the intention to inform the process of creating computational systems based on cognitive descriptions of the narrative creation process. After running the experiments, annotating the videos and analysing the output, we have concluded that there are a number of common modi cations that humans tend to apply to a newly created draft, and that this information can be used to the development of storytelling systems

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