Character Focused Narrative Models for Computational Storytelling

Abstract

My thesis aims at conceptualizing and implementing a computational model of narrative generation that is informed by narratological theory as well as cognitive multi-agent simulation models. It approaches this problem by taking a mimetic stance towards fictional characters and investigates how narrative phenomena related to characters can be computationally recreated from a deep character model grounded in multi agent systems. Based on such a conceptualization of narrative it explores how the generation of plot can be controlled, and how the quality of the resulting plot can be evaluated, in dependence of fictional characters. By that it contributes to research on computational creativity by implementing an evaluative storytelling system, and to narratology by proposing a generative narrative theory based on several post-structuralist descriptive theories.

VEsNA, a Framework for Virtual Environments via Natural Language Agents and Its Application to Factory Automation

“…Being general-purpose, VEsNA is not limited to the factory automation domain. Indeed, one of our original reasons for the development of VEsNA was to create a tool for interactive, agent-based theatrical story-telling along the lines of [69][70][71][72][73][74]. In that domain, the presence of cognitive, goal-driven, nonplaying characters in the Unity scene able to perform some actions on their own provides a strong motivation for the integration of JaCaMo and Unity.…”