- Author:
- Scott R. Turner
Telling a story is a difficult task that requires a variety of knowledge and cognitive processes: knowledge about themes, writing techniques, the story world, and presentation; processes such as planning, problem-solving, recall and creativity. This dissertation presents a model of the storytelling process which incorporates theories of creativity, memory and author-level planning. This model has been implemented in a computer program called MINSTREL which tells short, theme-based stories about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
MINSTREL's creativity process is based upon creativity heuristics called Transform-Recall-Adapt Methods (TRAMs). Each TRAM integrates a simple problem transformation which searches the problem-space for new knowledge to apply to a problem with a corresponding adaptation which can adapt any discovered knowledge to the original problem. By using TRAMs to augment the problem-solving process, MINSTREL is able to invent useful new problem solutions. By incorporating creativity into the recall process, MINSTREL makes creativity available to any cognitive process, and permits the use of multiple TRAMs to make creative "leaps".
MINSTREL's storytelling process is based upon a model of author-level problem-solving. In addition to a process model of author-level problem-solving, MINSTREL implements four important classes of author-level goals and plans: (1) Thematic, (2) Dramatic, (3) Consistency, and (4) Presentation. MINSTREL uses these goals and plans to tell a number of short stories in the King Arthur domain.
MINSTREL is a computational model of the cognitive processes of storytelling and creativity. MINSTREL (1) describes a process model of storytelling, (2) identifies important storytelling goals and plans, (3) identifies fundamental storytelling processes, (4) describes a process model of creativity, (5) explains how a problem-solver can find and adapt old knowledge to create new solutions, (6) identifies useful creativity heuristics, (7) explains creative "leaps", (8) explains the relation of creativity to problem-solving, (9) describes the relationship between memory and creativity, and (10) integrates creativity into a larger cognitive model.
Cited By
- Gervás P, Concepción E, León C, Méndez G and Delatorre P (2019). The long path to narrative generation, IBM Journal of Research and Development, 63:1, (8:1-8:10), Online publication date: 1-Jan-2019.
- Green M, Barros G, Liapis A and Togelius J DATA agent Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, (1-10)
- Concepción E, Gervás P, Méndez G and León C Using CNL for Knowledge Elicitation and Exchange Across Story Generation Systems Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Controlled Natural Language - Volume 9767, (81-91)
- Nissan E Tale Variants and Analysis in Episodic Formulae Part II of Essays Dedicated to Yaacov Choueka on Language, Culture, Computation. Computing of the Humanities, Law, and Narratives - Volume 8002, (138-192)
- Nissan E Narratives, Formalism, Computational Tools, and Nonlinearity Part II of Essays Dedicated to Yaacov Choueka on Language, Culture, Computation. Computing of the Humanities, Law, and Narratives - Volume 8002, (270-393)
- Aylett R and Louchart S I contain multitudes Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition, (337-340)
- Tearse B Minstrel remixed Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, (253-255)
- León C and Gervás P A top-down design methodology based on causality and chronology for developing assisted story generation systems Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Creativity and cognition, (363-364)
- Gervás P Engineering linguistic creativity Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Second Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, (23-30)
- Solis C, Siy J, Tabirao E and Ong E Planning author and character goals for story generation Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, (63-70)
- Mott B and Lester J U-director Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, (977-984)
- Moorman K and Ram A A model of creative understanding Proceedings of the Twelfth AAAI National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (74-79)
Index Terms
- Minstrel: a computer model of creativity and storytelling
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