A declarative model for simple narratives

• Main Author: R. Raymond Lang
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: AAAI Press 1999
• Subjects: eskimo*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.63.3291; http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/michaelm/www/nidocs/Lang.pdf

This paper describes a declarative model for simple narratives. The model describes what it is about a sequence of events such that reporting the sequence constitutes a story. Previous work in story generation has followed one of two tracks: (1) declarative, or isolating the regular structure of stories and then creating text which conforms to that structure, and (2) procedural, that is, modeling and recreating the processes used by human authors. Frequently, researchers in first track were unable to point to a concrete implementation based upon their model; researchers in the second track did not directly address the question of what constitutes a story. By implementing a story grammar, we address both these difficulties. Background Anthropology and linguistics intersect when attention focuses on the legends and folklore pertaining to a culture. In the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm published their collections of traditional domestic tales (Grimm 1987) of the German people. Subsequently, Aleksandr Afanasev published his collection of Russian folk tales (Afanasev 1974), (Afanasev 1975) which Vladimir Propp used for his investigations into the morphology of the folktale (Propp 1968). Contemporary investigations into story structure reached a watershed in 1973, when B.N. Colby published a grammar for Eskimo folktales (Colby 1973). Colby was the first to use formal grammars to describe linguistic phenomenon beyond single sentences. We also use a formal grammar to describe narratives; to this end, we have developed a set of structural components along with rules for their composition. Our model is (1) general enough to apply to compilations of the sort described above, and (2) sufficiently detailed to rule out constructions of non-stories. In what follows, we briefly review previous work in story modeling according to whether the work was done from a declarative or procedural perspective. Previous Work in Declarative Story Modeling Rumelhart (Rumelhart 1975) develops a model for the organization ...