Schemas for Narrative Generation Mined from Existing Descriptions of Plot

Abstract

Computational generation of literary artifacts very often resorts to template-like schemas that can be instantiated into complex structures. With this view in mind, the present paper reviews a number of existing attempts to provide an elementary set of patterns for basic plots. An attempt is made to formulate these descriptions of possible plots in terms of character functions, an abstraction of plot-bearing elements of a story originally formulated by Vladimir Propp. These character functions act as the building blocks of the Propper system, an existing framework for computational story generation. The paper explores the set of extensions required to the original set of character functions to allow for a basic representation of the analysed schemata, and a solution for automatic generation of stories based on this formulation of the narrative schemas. This solution uncovers important insights on the relative expressive power of the representation of narrative in terms of character functions, and their impact on the generative potential of the framework is discussed.