Ex-Tarot: An extended Tarot-based narrative generation

Abstract

Pattern-based story generation combines predefined patterns and story templates to generate stories. The Tarot cards provide a variety of meanings and interpretations which can be used as a part of such a story generation system. In this paper we describe the implementation of Ex-Tarot, a Tarot based narrative generation, which extends the expressive range of a previously built system by several orders of magnitude, by extending upon the interpretations used by the system, as well as utilizing Tarot cards in a novel way for character properties. The output of our system are short story-summaries, as could be used to advertise an upcoming movie, rendered as English text. We evaluate the stories produced by our systems in terms of consistency, perceived interest, and measure the presence of grammatical errors in the natural language output. Our system is available as open source software, and we discuss several options for improvement and future work.