Slant: A Blackboard System to Generate
Plot, Figuration, and Narrative Discourse Aspects of Stories
Nick Montfort
The Trope Tank, MIT
77 Mass Ave, 14N-233
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
nickm@nickm.com
Rafael Pérez y Pérez
División de Ciencias de la
Comunicación y Diseño
Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa,
México D. F.
rperez@correo.cua.uam.mx
D. Fox Harrell
Imagination, Computation, &
Expression Laboratory, MIT
77 Mass Ave, 14N-207
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
fox.harrell@mit.edu
Andrew Campana
Department of East Asian
Languages & Civilizations
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
campana@fas.harvard.edu
Abstract
We introduce Slant, a system that integrates more than a
decade of research into computational creativity, and
specifically story generation, by connecting subsystems
that deal with plot, figuration, and the narrative discourse
using a blackboard. The process of integrating these systems
highlights differences in the representation of story
and has led to a better understanding of how story can be
usefully abstracted. The plot generator MEXICA and a
component of Curveship are used with little modification
in Slant, while the figuration subsystem Fig-S and the template
generator GRIOT-Gen, inspired by GRIOT, are also
components. The development of the new subsystem
Verso, which deals with genre, shows how different genres
can be computationally modeled and applied to in-development
stories to generate results that are surprising in terms
of their connections and valuable in terms of their relationship
to cultural questions. Example stories are discussed, as
is the potential of the system to allow for broader collaboration,
the empirical testing of how subsystems interrelate,
and possible contributions in literary and artistic contexts.
Introduction
Slant is a system for creative story generation that integrates
different types of expertise and creativity; the framework it
provides also means that other systems, implementing other
approaches to story generation, can be integrated into it in
the future. The development of Slant has involved formalizing,
reworking, and testing ideas about creative storytelling
and what is important to writing stories—specifically, the
poetics of figuration, the poetics of plot development, and
the poetics of narrating. The system incorporates a new perspective
on genre and integrates components from three existing
systems: D. Fox Harrell’s GRIOT, Rafael Pérez y
Pérez’s MEXICA, and Nick Montfort’s Curveship.
Story generation systems have not yet used an architecture
of this sort to encapsulate different expertise and different
aspects of creativity; nor have they incorporated major
components that are based on existing, proven systems
by different researchers.
Slant is a blackboard system in which different subsystems,
each of them informed by and modeling humanistic
theories, collaborate together, working incrementally to
fully specify a story. An alternative, simpler process involves
making decisions in a “pipeline,” in which one system
offers, for instance, a plot and another system determines
how the narrative discourse will be arranged. Although
this system seems to be a poor model of human creativity,
it is a reasonable first step toward a “blackboard”
system. Two of the Slant collaborators previously developed
such a pipelined system with two stages (Montfort and
Pérez y Pérez 2008). The current project involves five major
subsystems rather than two and uses a blackboard architecture,
allowing any of the subsystems that work during the
main phase of generation to augment the story representation
at any point.
The generation of stories in Slant begins with minimal,
partial proposals from a simple unit, the Seeder. In
turn, the subsystems MEXICA, Verso, and Fig-S read and
add to this set of proposals, each according to its focus.
When the proposals are complete, the finished story specification
is sent to GRIOT-Gen so conceptual blending can be
applied to the relevant templates and then to the three-stage
pipelined text generation component of Curveship. Curveship-Gen
realizes a finished story in the form of a text file
that can be read and considered by human readers.
This paper introduces the architecture of the system and
describes the subsystems that build and realize stories together.
It includes a discussion of what was learned by inteProceedings
of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity 2013 168
grating three different lines of research on story generation.
Reflections are also offered on the first set of stories produced
by the system, and some discussion of the potential of
the system is included as well. Slant will undergo more refinement
and development, but the work that has been done
so far is of relevance to those working to implement largescale
computational creativity systems that integrate heterogeneous
subsystems, to those developing representations of
story and other creative representations, and to those working
specifically in story generation.
Creativity and the Architecture of Slant
Boden holds that creativity involves the production of new,
surprising, and valuable results (Boden 2004). In the case of
story generation and other literary endeavors, being new involves
not repeating what has been done before (by the system
or in the wider culture); surprise often manifests itself
in unusual juxtapositions that are effective, though one
would not have guessed it; and value, rather than indicating
that the story is of didactic or economic value, means that a
story accomplishes some imaginative or poetic purpose—it
connects in some way to cultural or psychological issues or
questions and allows the reader to think about them in new
ways. Stories that surprise readers by bringing unusual elements
together and which provide for this sort of reflection,
but which do so in the same way as existing stories, are not
new. Stories that are innovative and could allow for reflection,
but which do not involve unusual juxtapositions or
connections, are not surprising. Stories that are fresh and involve
unusual combinations of elements, but do not ultimately
seem to have a point of any sort, are not of value.
Taking value to indicate relevance within culture means
that the value of a story is similar to what has been called,
with regard to conversational stories of the sort that are uttered
all the time by people, its “point” (Polanyi 1989).
While the point of a story is understood in the context of a
specific conversation, the ability of a story to have a point at
all can be understood within the context of culture. Valuable
stories are those that have a point to at least some readers
when they encounter them in some context.
Beyond Boden’s three components of creativity, we also
consider a higher level of creativity. Namely, the various
cognitive processes for conceptualization that enable people
to recognize and generate new, surprising, and valuable cultural
content are forms of everyday creativity. Cognitive scientist
Gilles Fauconnier has referred to these process of
meaning construction as “backstage cognition” and asserts
that backstage cognition includes specific phenomena such
as “viewpoints and reference points, figure-ground/profilebases/landmark-trajector
organization, metaphorical, analogical,
and other mappings, idealized models, framing,
construal, mental spaces, counterpart connections, roles,
prototypes, metonymy, polysemy, conceptual blending, fictive
motion, [and] force dynamics” (Fauconnier 1999).
These cognitive processes are especially important to note
here because the notion of creativity informing Fig-S and
GRIOT-Gen is based on a model of the creative backstage
cognition phenomenon of metaphorical mapping, most
prominently, but also mental spaces, counterpart connections,
metaphor, analogy, and metonymy in the case of the
GRIOT system that inspired them.
To succeed repeatedly and reliably at creativity, a storytelling
system must have mechanisms relevant to each of
these aspects of creativity. It must have some model of what
has happened before to prompt novelty, somehow provide
for stories that join aspects together in unusual and effective
ways, and somehow provide for stories that relate to culture
and have a point. The means of accomplishing these aspects
of creativity do not have to be abstracted into separate components
of a system, but they do need to be somehow realized
by a creative system.
A simple way that systems can connect and to some extent
collaborate involves organizing them in a pipeline. This
can model a regimented assembly-line process or
“waterfall” model in which each subsystem participates in
one phase and interfaces only with the systems before and
after it. For certain processes, this may be adequate, but for
the nuanced process of creativity, which involves making
interesting connections, the components of a system probably
need to interact in a less constrained and unidirectional
manner. This was the rationale for the blackboard architecture
used in Slant.
The Blackboard and Subsystems
In Slant, the three major story-building subsystems can
write to and read from a blackboard representation of the
story in progress. Currently, the systems function in practice
much as a pipeline does, with each of the three subsystems
augmenting the story representation once. The systems can
influence each other “backwards” only via Verso examining
the current plot and proposing a new action (not just a specification
of narrative discourse, which is always proposed.)
MEXICA can then incorporate that expanded plot into its
next ER cycle that it uses to elaborate the plot. Although the
interactions between subsystems are not intricate at this
Figure 1: The architecture of Slant.
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity 2013 169
point, the framework is in place for more elaborate blackboard
interaction in future versions of Slant.
Currently, MEXICA contributes an initial, partial plot – a
minimal, random one will eventually be provided at the first
step by the Seeder. Then, Verso assigns a genre and a specification
of the narrative discourse, and MEXCIA further
elaborates the plot until it is complete. Verso may specify
constraints on how the story is to be developed. For instance,
it may specify that a particular character, who has
been designated as the narrator of the story, should not die.
MEXICA will respect these in elaborating the story. Finally,
Fig-S determines what figuration will be used. Eventually,
another system, the Harvester, will check to see if all aspects
of the story are complete, allowing the subsystems to
augment the story in several different orders. After the story
representation is complete, it is realized. GRIOT-Gen determines
how to realize figurative representations and Curveship-Gen
does content selection, microplanning, and surface
realization to produce the final text.
The MEXICA subsystem has the most explicit model of
an aspect of creativity; it explicitly evaluates the novelty and
interestingness of the component of story that it develops,
the plot. Verso and Fig-S both aim to add surprise by combining
conventional genres and metaphors in unusual ways.
They do not currently measure how surprising their results
are, but they embody techniques for choosing appropriate
combinations that may be seen as creative by readers.
Foundational Systems
MEXICA. This system generates plots or frameworks for
short stories about the Mexicas, the old inhabitants of what
today is México city, also known as the Aztecs. MEXICA’s
process is based on the engagement/reflection cycle, a cognitive
account of writing by Mike Sharples (Pérez y Pérez
and Sharples 1999, 2001, 2004). During engagement the
system focuses on generating sequences of actions driven by
content and rhetorical constraints and avoids the use of explicit
goals or predefined story-structures. During reflection
MEXICA evaluates the novelty and interestingness of the
material produced so far and verifies the coherence of the
story (see also Pérez y Pérez et al. 2011).
The design of the system is based on structures known as
Linguistic Representations of Actions (LIRAs), which are
sets of actions that any character can perform in the story
and whose consequences produce some change in the storyworld
context. There are two types of possible pre-conditions
and postconditions in MEXICA: emotional links between
characters and dramatic tensions in the story.
MEXICA is incorporated as the generator of plot. It generates
plot in stages, allowing other systems to interact with
the story representation as it does so. In the current system,
it can be influenced by actions added to the story by Verso.
GRIOT. This is a system that is the basis for interactive and
generative text and multimedia works using Harrell’s Alloy
algorithm for conceptual blending. These works include poetic,
animated, and documentary systems that themselves
produce different output each time they are run. While
GRIOT allows authors to implement narrative and poetic
structures (e.g., plots), a major contribution of GRIOT is its
orientation toward the dynamic generation of content resulting
from modeling aspects of figurative thought that can be
described formally. That is, GRIOT allows authors to fix elements
such as narrative structure while varying output in
terms of theme, metaphor, emotional tone, and related types
of what is here called “figuration” (results of figurative
thought).
Rather than being based on a single knowledge base or
ontology, as is the case with many classic AI systems,
GRIOT creates blends between different ontologies (Harrell
2006, 2007). Indeed, a key feature of GRIOT is the ability
of authors to construct subjective ontologies based in specific
authorial worldviews, elements of which are then
blended in a manner that maintains coherence based on several
formal optimality principles inspired by a subset of
those proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner
(1999). This approach allows for novel, surprising, and
valuable content to be generated that retains conceptual coherence.
GRIOT, like MEXICA, has also been used to implement
cultural forms of narrative that are not often privileged
in computer science, in this case oral traditions of narrative
from the African diaspora (Harrell 2007a). This is important
because some forms of oral narrative have more in
common with narratives in virtual worlds than the graphocentric
(text-biased) forms of narrative privileged in most
research in the field of narratology in literary studies.
The implemented GRIOT system, and experience with it,
have informed the development of Fig-S, a component of
Slant that proposes what types of figuration, mainly
metaphor, will be used in telling the story. GRIOT also inspires
GRIOT-Gen, the component that generates natural
language representations for figuratively enriched versions
of particular actions after the story representation is completely
developed (see also Goguen and Harrell 2008).
Curveship. This is an interactive fiction system that provides
a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and
things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse,
so that the narration and description of the simulated
world can change (Montfort 2009, 2011). Curveship can tell
events out of order, using flashback and other techniques,
and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters
and their perceptions and understandings. It is based
on Genette’s theories (Genette 1983) and incorporates other
ideas from narratology. The architecture of Curveship draws
on well-established techniques for simulating an IF world,
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cludes a standard three-stage natural language generation
pipeline. To make use of the system, either for interactive
fiction authoring or story generation, one specifies highlevel
narrative aspects; the system does appropriate content
selection, works out grammatical specifics, and realizes the
text with, for instance, proper verb formation.
Some world simulation abilities and the narrative text
generation capabilities of Curveship are used directly in
Slant in Curveship-Gen, the component that outputs the finished,
realized story.
The Slantstory XML Format
Connecting different systems so that they can work together
means establishing shared representations. For Slant, that
representation is an XML format called Slantstory. It contain
all of the information that is needed in the final steps to
represent each action and realize the story, meaning that it
must contain sufficiently granular information about the
plot, the narrative discourse, and the types of conceptual
blending that are to be done. This information is not only
needed at the last stage, where the generation of text is done.
It can also be read by the different subsystems during story
generation, when the story is not yet complete, and can influence
the next stage of story augmentation. Because of
this, Slantstory is a format not only for representing entire,
complete stories but also for representing partial stories, the
composition of which is in progress. In the current implementation,
subsystems can augment a story and declare it
complete, but cannot revise or remove what has already
been contributed.
To declare a common representation for (both partial and
complete) stories, an agreement had to be reached between
different perspectives on what the elements of a story are,
what is to be represented about each, and how granular the
representation of each element is. The Slantstory DTD specifies
five elements that occur within the root:
A story cannot be complete without all five of these present,
but only existents and actions are required at every stage of
story development. The existents are of three types: locations,
characters, and things. Actions each have a verb
(which might be a phrase such as “try to flee”) and may
have any or all of agent, direct object, and indirect object
specified. The “instantaneous” tension level, or change in
the tension associated with an action, is also represented
there. The actions also have a unique ID number which indicates
their chronological order in the story world, as in:
One challenge in developing and using this blackboard representation
involves the different models of existents and
actions that the three foundational systems use. Characters
and locations, but nothing like props or “things,” are represented
in MEXICA, while Curveship represents all three
sorts of existents to provide the type of simulation that is
typical in interactive fiction, where objects can typically be
acquired, given to other characters, placed on surfaces and
in containers, and so on. MEXICA was modified for use in
Slant to produce appropriate representations of whatever
things were mentioned in actions.
The representation of action was also not consistent between
the foundational systems. Curveship has a typology
of four actions: Configure (move some existent into, onto,
out of, off, or to a different location), Modify (change the
state of some existent), Sense (gain information about the
world from sensing), and Behave (any other action, not resulting
in any change of state in the world). Although they
may be quite different, all actions are meant to correspond
to a sentence with a single verb phrase when realized.
MEXICA’s actions, on the other hand, are not categorized
in this way and include many different sorts of representations.
There are, for instance, complex actions such as
FAKED_STAB_INSTEAD_HURT_HIMSELF, indications
that an action was not taken such as NOT_CURE, and indications
that a state is to be described at a certain point such
as WAS_BROTHER_OF.
The first of these issues, the granularity of action, was
handled by developing a mapping between MEXICA actions
and Slantstory actions. A limitation of this approach is
that actions cannot be inserted into the middle of a series of
Slantstory actions that correspond to a single MEXICA action;
this is enforced by giving the actions consecutive IDs,
so that there is no room to add further actions. Ideally, however,
other subsystems would be able to modify the
Slantstory representation of actions in any way. The second
of these issues bring up the interesting issue of disnarration
(Prince 1988), that it is possible in a story to not only tell
what has happened but to also tell what what did not happen,
and that doing so can have an interesting effect on the
reader. Disnarration is not the representation of action, however,
so it cannot be represented in a straightforward way in
a list of actions, and should be handled elsewhere—in the
spin element, for instance. Resolving the final issue related
to stative information also requires further work, since the
system should both represent facts about the story world
(probably in the existents element) and when to mention
them (probably in the spin element).
GRIOT transforms, for instance, the “agent” and “direct”
attributes of an action into conceptual categories. While
Slantstory uses a grammatical-sounding model of actions,
with direct and indirect objects, Curveship can in fact realize
sentences out of these where the agent is the direct object
and the “direct” existent is the subject—when it realizes
a sentence in the passive, for instance. So, both GRIOT and
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tion in slightly different ways.
Furthermore, the templates that are used to represent sentences
in Curveship, which is designed for narrative variation,
are not well-designed for the generation of figurative
text. Curveship’s templates are set up to allow a slot for an
agent, for example, which might eventually be filled with
“the jaguar knight” “I” “he” or “you” depending upon how
narrator and narratee are set and whether the noun phrase is
pronominalized. Fig-S, however, may determine that the adjective
“enflamed” should be used with this noun phrase because
it will participate in the conventional metaphor LOVE
IS FIRE. In this case, Curveship-Gen should generate either
“the enflamed jaguar knight” “I, enflamed,” “he, enflamed,”
or “you, enflamed.” All the possibilities for combinations of
figuration (not just the use of an adjective) and all the existing
ways that Curveship can generate noun phrases need to
be implemented in the next version of Slant.
Verso: Augmenting a Story Based on Genre
Verso, like MEXICA and Fig-S, reads a Slantstory XML
file from the blackboard and outputs an updated one. While
MEXICA is focused on plot and Fig-S selects an appropriate
domain for blending particular representations of action,
Verso’s operation is based on a model genre. This subsystem
operates by:
1. Detecting particular aspects of the in-progress story
(typically actions with particular verbs, although
possibly series of actions or sets of characters) that
indicate the story’s suitability to a particular genre,
for all known genres.
2. Selecting the genre that is most appropriate.
3. Updating the story using rules specific to that
genre. The narrative discourse is always updated
by specifying attributes of and elements within
“spin.” This determines elements such as the focalizer,
narrator, time of narrating, rhetorical style,
and beginning and/or ending phrases to frame the
story. The update can also contribute new actions
to the story, which can influence the way that
MEXICA continues to develop the plot.
This procedure brings a model of genre awareness into
Slant, but it is an unusual process from the standpoint of
conventional human creativity. More often than not, an author
chooses a genre and then writes or tells something
within it, rather than begin with a partial story and finding a
genre that suits it. The overall effect, however, is to introduce
sensitivity to an important aspect of human creativity.
Verso’s model does not seem completely aligned with the
direction of genre studies in recent decades. This field has
moved from a formalist definitional framework of genre to
one that is semiotic, focusing in particular on the “rhetorical
study of the generic actions of everyday readers and
writers” (Devitt 2008). Recently, genre studies has deemphasized
and argued against the idea of genres as distinct
categories with characteristic elements that identify them.
Scholars now dispute the idea that characteristics can be
identified and summed up to indicate the likelihood that a
text is part of a certain genre. They note that few genres
have true fundamental elements. Particularly in the case of
literary genres (e.g. detective fiction, science fiction, horror,
fantasy), even when there seem to be some core characteristics
that all works within a category share, almost any
“defining” characteristic could be countered by an example
work which lacks that element but is still undeniably of that
genre. Furthermore, a fundamental dilemma arises in the act
of classification itself, the problem of “whether these units
exist independently of the taxonomical scheme, or arise as a
result of the attempt to classify” (Ryan 1981).
However, these recent concerns pertain most directly to
scholarly and critical work; they do not bear upon the way
genre is used in literary creativity. Sharp definitions of
genre that are developed through writing practice have
served many authors well, including Raymond Queneau,
who used 99 different genres, modes, or styles to retell the
same simple story in Exercises in Style. The problem of
whether classification compels texts into categories is a
problem for analysis, but it is a productive idea for literary
creativity. Additionally, as Steve Neale has pointed out,
“genres are instances of repetition and difference;” it is precisely
through the differentiation from the established norms
of a genre that a work can become part of it (Neale 1984).
Verso, while making use of those “instances of repetition,”
also aims to effectively model the production of this necessary
difference.
The genres that have been implemented so far are not literary,
either in the sense of broad differentiations such as
“prose” and “poetry,” or in the sense of categories such as
“romance,” “cyberpunk,” “noir,” and so on. Instead, Verso
uses a broader definition of what constitutes genre, one
which includes categories that may very well be alternatively
thought of as styles, modes, or even distinct media,
and which relate to both fiction and non-fiction as well as to
oral and written communication. In the introduction to Writing
Genres, Devitt provides many examples of the influence
of genre in our daily lives, including such wide-ranging categories
as the joke, lecture, mystery novel, travel brochure,
small talk, sales letter, and, most appropriately, the research
paper (Devitt 2008). It is this broader conception of genre,
rather than a strictly literary one, that Verso aims to model.
The genres implemented in Verso tend towards the stylistic
rather than the thematic. In part due to the pre-existing
capabilities of Curveship, and in part because of the domain
in which MEXICA operates, the genres used are those that
can be identified and produced through changes in the narrative
discourse (focalization, time of narrating, order of
events in the telling, etc.) rather than the story world domain
(which could incorporate dragons, spaceships, magic, etc.).
A concrete example is provided by the “confession”
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity 2013 172
genre, which casts a story so that it sounds like it is being
told to a priest at confession. To determine if this genre is
applicable, the system checks to see if one or more actions
are likely “sins” (robbing, killing, etc.) based on a list of
these. Each “sin” raises the suitability of this genre. If “confession”
is selected as the genre to use, the Slantstory XML
representation is updated. A “sinner” is located—the agent
of the last sinful action. This sinner is specified as the narrator
(the “I” of the story). There is no narratee (or “you”),
since we presume that the priest was not part of the events
that were being told. The time of narrating is set to “after,”
which results in past-tense narration, and the “hesitant” style
is used, injecting “um” and “er” into the story as if the
speaker were nervous and reticent. Finally, a conventional
opening (“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been
a month since my last confession.”) and a conventional conclusion
(“Ten Hail Marys? Thank you, Father.”) are added.
The “confession” genre produces plausible and amusing
results. Some of this has to do with the formulaic nature of
the genre. As one reads additional confessions, the rigid,
repetitive opening and conclusion can be amusing, because
they model the ritualized interaction of confession. Read in
this light, it is only more amusing that ten Hail Marys are always
given for penance, whether the penitent tried to swipe
something or committed a murder. Finally, because Spanish
conquerors came to the Americas and imposed Catholicism
on the natives, MEXICA-generated plots that are told in this
genre can be read as a comment upon, or at least a provocation
about, the colonial history of Mexico.Importantly, these
two subsystems did not invent this juxtaposition of the
MEXICA and Catholic ritual; rather, humans decided many
years go to develop a story generator about the Mexica and
decided recently to develop a “confession” genre template.
However, the subsystems’ collaboration as part of Slant involves
automatically finding occasions when the juxtaposition
of these two is particularly effective. Verso’s work and
MEXICA’s work combine in Slant to provide more cultural
resonance, to be more surprising and also to be more valuable
by virtue of being thought-provoking.
In the current system 10 genres have been implemented:
confession, diary, dream, fragments, hangover, joke, letter,
memento, memoir, play-by-play, prophecy, and the default
“standard” story. These take advantage of only a limited
range of Curveship’s narrative variation capabilities. For instance,
the focalization of a story can be varied, but we have
not yet implemented genres that focalize stories based on
particular characters; similarly, Curveship is already capable
of narrating with flashbacks and making other more elaborate
changes in order. There are now only two prose styles
that are used, “excited” for play-by-play and “hesitant” for
confession. It would also be straightforward to elaborate the
Slantstory representation and to modify Curveship-Gen to
allow for expression that better relates to a wider variety of
genres. In discussions so far we have already listed more
than 100 genres, most of which we believe will be to some
extent recognizable and applicable to the short stories produced
by Slant.
Fig-S and GRIOT-Gen for Figuration
Fig-S reads a Slantstory XML file from the blackboard and
updates it to include metaphorical content. Metaphor here
can be understood as an asymmetrical conceptual blend in
which all content from one domain called the “target space”
is integrated with a subset of content from another called the
“source space” (Grady, Oakley, and Coulson 1999). Fig-S
currently implements ontologies representing several domains
empirically identified as important in poetry such as
“death” and “love” (Lakoff and Turner 1989) that can be
used to generate metaphors such as REJECTION IS
DEATH or ADMIRATION IS LOVE.
Fig-S begins by processing each of the actions from the
Slantstory XML file to assess whether they will be replaced
by metaphorical versions of the same action. Currently,
there are two modes in which this processing can be done. If
ONE-METAPHOR is set to true, then the Slantstory is analyzed
to find which single source domain is appropriate to
map onto the greatest number of actions in order to produce
metaphors. Otherwise, each action will be analyzed individually
in order to find an appropriate source domain to map
onto it. The first mode typically results in more coherent
output, the second mode typically results in a greater degree
and variety of metaphorical output. As an example of an action
that has been mapped onto by the source domain LOVE
in order to produce a metaphorical action, the Slantstory action:
could be processed by Fig-S and added to the Slantstory as:
While Fig-S currently has implemented simple, metaphorical
form of blending as a first step, it could be extended to
use a more robust blending algorithm such as Alloy, or even
to extend Alloy to result in even more novel, surprising,
and/or culturally valued blends using an extended set of optimality
principles.
GRIOT-Gen is used to produce specific output template
from metaphorical actions in a Curveship-Gen format. For
example, the metaphorical action above could be realized in
a number of ways. The default produced by GRIOT-Gen,
for a story in which neither virgin nor princess are narrator
or narratee, would be structured as:
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity 2013 173
'61': 'the burning virgin [become/v] jealous-of
the incendiary princess',
however, it can alternatively be structured as:
'61': '[@virgin/s] like burning [get/v] jealous
of the incendiary [princess/o]',
if there is a preference for a simile-oriented style for the
subject. It is also possible to use a “source-element/target-element”
structure as in:
'61': 'the burning/virgin [get/v] jealous of and
[burn/v] for the incendiary/princess'
to be very explicit about every element that has been integrated.
GRIOT-Gen currently has multiple such exposition
forms implemented and is easily extensible.
Slant’s First Stories
In the current system some spin (narrative discourse specification)
is necessary, although it may simply involve the default
settings, while figurative action representations are optional.
To begin with, this amusing but flawed story was
generated without figuration, but with contributions from
MEXICA and Verso:
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a month
since my last confession. An enemy slid. The enemy fell.
The enemy injured himself. I located a curative plant. I
cured the enemy with the curative plant. The tlatoani kidnapped
me. The enemy sought the tlatoani. The enemy
travelled. The enemy, um, looked. The enemy found the
tlatoani. The enemy observed, uh, the tlatoani. The enemy
drew a weapon. The enemy attacked the tlatoani. The enemy
killed the tlatoani with a dagger. The enemy rescued
me. The enemy entranced, uh, me. I became jealous of the
enemy. I killed the enemy with the dagger. I killed myself,
uh, with the dagger. Ten Hail Marys? Thank you, Father.
The “sinner” who narrates the story dies, a problem which
can also crop up when the “diary” genre issued. Since Verso
can assign the genre of the story before the plot is complete,
there was initially no way that Verso be sure that the character
it selects as narrator will not die. This requires an interaction
between the genre-selecting system, Verso, and the
plot-generating system, MEXIA. We implemented an additional
set of constraints on how the plotting could be done
which either require or prohibit that a certain tension, as defined
in MEXICA, arise. One of these tensions is “actor
dead,” letting Verso prohibit a narrator’s death.
A story with figuration follows. This one is generated
without the constraint for a single conventional metaphor to
be used (ONE-METAPHOR is false), so there is a colorful
diversity of less consistent metaphors. The genre chosen is
“play-by-play,” based on sports commentary, which may be
a suitable one for the range of metaphor that is used:
This is Ehecatl, live from the scene. The cold-wind eagle
knight is despising the icy jaguar knight! The cold-wind
jaguar knight is despising the chilling eagle knight! Yes, an
eagle knight is fighting a jaguar knight! Look at this, the
eagle knight is drawing a weapon! Look at this, the eagle
knight is closing on the jaguar knight! The gardener eagle
knight is wounding the weed jaguar knight! And now, the
jaguar knight is bleeding! Yes, the consumed eagle-knight
is panicking! And, eagle knight is hiding! Holy -- the
snowflake slave is despising the chilling jaguar knight! The
freezing-wind jaguar knight is despising the cold slave!
And, yes, the cold-wind slave is detesting the chilling
jaguar knight! A slave is curing the jaguar knight! And, the
slave is returning to the city! And, the jaguar knight is suffering!
The frozen jaguar knight is dying! Back to you!
MEXICA’s stative descriptions of characters could probably
be mentioned more rapidly, or perhaps not at all, to keep the
action going. This could be done with an existing facility in
Slantstory for omitting actions when narrating. This story
would also benefit from pronominalization, which Curveship-Gen
is capable of but which would need to be either
turned on for all stories or specified at an earlier stage.
Slant’s Research Potential
We plan to further develop the system we have initiated to
explore new ways that computational creativity researchers
can collaborate, new models of storytelling that abstract different
sorts of expertise and emphasis, and new ways to
compare the importance of and interaction between different
aspects of story. We intend that the system will be used for
empirical studies of how people receive generated stories
and will also be brought into literary and artistic contexts.
Using the Slantstory XML blackboard, many different
subsystems can be developed for Slant, which will allow
Slant to be run with any subset of them. For instance, if
Verso is turned off so that the specification of the narrative
discourse is not done by that subsystem, either a default narrative
discourse specification could be used (as would be the
case now, since Verso is the only subsystem that updates
this aspect) or that specification can be built up by one or
more other subsystems. This allows the effect of each subsystem,
in the context of Slant overall, to be carefully examined.
Readers of stories generated under different conditions
could be asked not only to rank the outputs in terms of quality,
but also to comment on what they thought about particular
elements (such as characters) and high-level qualities
(whether the story was funny, for instance, or whether it
seemed plausible).
The project can also facilitate a broader collaboration between
researchers of story generation. As long as researchers
find the Slantstory XML representation adequate
for their purpose, they can develop new subsystems that
help to build stories based on other theories or concerns. For
instance, a researcher interested in how creativity occurs in
social contexts could model the process in a unit that reads
from and writes to the blackboard and models social influProceedings
of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity 2013 174
ence and awareness. As just discussed, this new system
could be tried in many combinations with existing systems
and the outputs could be compared. This would help to
show not only the importance of social creativity as modeled
in this particular subsystem, but also how creativity of
this sort interacts with plot generation using the engagement-reflection
cycle, figuration based on conventional
metaphors, and awareness of genre.
We also anticipate that Slant will supply stories for exhibition
and publication in arts contexts, and the functional
system itself could be part of a digital media, electronic literature,
or e-poetry exhibit. In this way, Slant can contribute
to creative practice, and reactions and discussion in this context
can help us further develop a system that relates to contemporary
literary concerns.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Clara Fernandez-Vara and Ayse Gursoy for their
discussions of genre and of early ideas about Slant.
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