An algorithm to generate engaging narratives through non-linearity

Abstract

The order in which the events of a story are presented plays an important role in story-telling. In this paper, we present an algorithm that generates narratives of different presentation orders for a story by taking its plan representation and the desired amount of non-linearity as input. We use the principles of event-indexing model, a cognitive model of narrative comprehension, to generate narratives without affecting the ease of comprehension. We hypothesize that a narrative deviated from its chronological order and presented without affecting the ease of comprehension might lead to cognitive engagement. Empirical evaluation of the system was conducted to test this hypothesis along with the amount of non-linearity that could be introduced in a story without affecting the ease of comprehension.