"Narrative Prose Generation"

12/4/2000: [time not recorded]
[location not recorded]

Abstract: Given a fictional world, its characters, and a sequence of events, a narrative prose generator should in realtime create full-length short stories in rich natural language. An effective Narrative Prose Generation (NPG) model should exhibit the following characteristics: (1) it should create narrative descriptions that provide scene descriptions, generate character dialogue, and relate events that take place in the fictional world; (2) it should provide methods for generating stories whose linguistic and syntactic complexity is customizable; (3) it should operate effectively in a multilingual environment; and (4) all of these elements should function in realtime. We will describe the Author NPG architecture, which addresses the design criteria above. The Author architecture has been implemented in StoryBook, a narrative prose generator that produces multi-page narratives. To compose stories, StoryBook takes a story plan consisting of the actors, scenes, props and temporally ordered events as input from a narrative planner. It then uses a sentence planner to create sentential descriptions, revises them, and then employs a unification-based functional systemic grammar to create narratives in the language of choice. StoryBook offers features not found in other text generation systems, including generating prose that is multiple pages in length, and it integrates a number of aspects of text generators that have previously been studied in isolation.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006