Imaginative Recall with Story Intention Graphs

Abstract

Intelligent storytelling systems either formalize specific narrative structures proposed by narratologists (such as Propp and Bremond), or are founded on formal representations from artificial intelligence (such as plan structures from classical planning). This disparity in underlying knowledge representations leads to a lack of common evaluation metrics across story generation systems, particularly around the creativity aspect of generators. This paper takes Skald, a reconstruction of the Minstrel creative story generation system, and maps the representation to a formal narrative representation of Story Intention Graphs (SIG) proposed by Elson et al. This mapping facilitates the opportunity to expand the creative space of stories generated through imaginative recall in Minstrel while maintaining narrative complexity. We show that there is promise in using the SIG as an intermediate representation that is useful for evaluation of story generation systems.