Mani I. Computational Modeling of Narrative

Springer Nature Switzerland, 2022. — Reprint of original edition Morgan & Claypool, 2013. — 134 p. — ISBN: 978-3-031-01019-4, ISBN: 978-3-031-02147-3 (eBook)The field of literary theory called narratology evolved out of 20th century Russian formalism and European structuralism, but has its precursors in classical Greek philosophy.This field has developed sophisticated concepts and many illustrative examples related to aspects of narrative related to time, plot, narrative embedding, narrative voice, characterization, emotion, reader and audience response, point-of-view, etc. Similar notions have been given embodiments in artificial intelligence and formal semantic approaches to narrative.
However, there is no book providing foundational accounts of these narratological concepts in formal and computational terms.Myearlier book The Imagined Moment examined the intersection of narratological views of time in literature with work on temporal information extraction.The present
book is broader in scope, addressing narrative in the large rather than just time. I have tried to be as precise as possible, to make the book relevant to AI and game developers while still retaining, I hope, the interest of literary theorists.
In recent years, the demands of interactive entertainment, and interest in the creation of engaging narratives with life-like characters, have provided a fresh impetus to computational storytelling. Workshops on narrative have been the focus of AAAI Symposia in 1995 (Interactive Story
Systems: Plot and Character), 1999 (Narrative Intelligence), 2002 (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment), 2007 (Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT1)), and 2009 (INT2). The INT3 workshop was held in 2010, co-located at the International Conference on the Foundations
of Digital Games (FDG), and INT4 at the 2011 AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE). In addition, the Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS) conferences have been held in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, the International Conference on Virtual Storytelling (ICVS) in 2001, 2003,
2005, and 2007, the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE) conferences in 2003, 2004, and 2006, and the Computational Models ofNarrative (CMN) workshop in 2009 and 2012. This flurry of activity on narrative, much of it highly inter-disciplinary, makes a
book of this kind especially relevant.
I am extremely grateful to Jan Christoph Meister and David Elson for their reviews of a draft of the book, and to series editor Graeme Hirst for helping to chaperone this book from inception to final manuscript. I am also indebted to the many authors whose contributions I have cited here.
Finally, I would like to thank my family once again for all their moral support!