Plots as Summaries of Event Chains (Invited Talk)

The plot of a narrative addresses what happened, and why. While a number of interesting theories of plot have been explored, it has proved hard in narrative interpretation to automatically compute a representation of the plot. This talk describes how to build a representation of what happened by summarizing temporal chains of events that involve a particular protagonist. These chains, which are based on the work of Chambers, can be summarized by various methods, including pruning subgraphs in the representation. Linguistic challenges include habitual expressions and non-literal language. The talk concludes with suggestions for how to layer causal information on top of the representation of what happened

Thinking in stories

This thesis considers cognitive narrative a component of intelligence that specializes in generality. In exploring the ubiquitous external (mediated) and internal (cognitive) functions of narrative it provides two contributions to the literature: a uniquely cross-discipline survey of narratology that bridges humanities, social science, and computational fields; and a theory to generate cognitive personal narratives from ongoing perception. The implications of narrative cognition and cognitive narrative are discussed as well as the limitations of this introductory theory and the grounds for promising future work.M.S

Goal Reasoning: Papers from the ACS Workshop

This technical report contains the 14 accepted papers presented at the Workshop on Goal Reasoning, which was held as part of the 2015 Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS-15) in Atlanta, Georgia on 28 May 2015. This is the fourth in a series of workshops related to this topic, the first of which was the AAAI-10 Workshop on Goal-Directed Autonomy; the second was the Self-Motivated Agents (SeMoA) Workshop, held at Lehigh University in November 2012; and the third was the Goal Reasoning Workshop at ACS-13 in Baltimore, Maryland in December 2013