Narrative generation from the author’s perspective

Abstract This chapter discusses how planning techniques are employed for the automatic generation of narratives. In this approach, authors’ goals and characters’ goals drive the tale’s development. An author goal is a computer representation of a goal of a human story-writer, e.g. choosing a theme to develop a story. Thus, this chapter complements and expands the notions about problem-solving studied in previous chapters. The chapter introduces concepts that include story-theme structure and knowledge base (a characterization of the authors’ knowledge). It explains how to represent the organization of a story (Introduction, Development, Resolution, and Closing) employing data structures. Finally, we consider the main steps to generate a narrative based on planning: choosing a theme structure, creating the characters’ structures of the theme, instantiating the Introduction, instantiating the Development, instantiating the Resolution, instantiating the Closing, and transforming the data structures into English.