Quantitative Characteristics of Human-Written Short Stories as a Metric for Automated Storytelling

Abstract

Evaluating the extent to which computer-produced stories are structured like human-invented narratives can be an important component of the quality of a story plot. In this paper, we report on an empirical experiment in which human subjects have invented short plots in a constrained scenario. The stories were annotated according to features commonly found in existing automatic story generators. The annotation was designed to measure the proportion and relations of story components that should be used in automatic computational systems for matching human behaviour. Results suggest that there are relatively common patterns that can be used as input data for identifying similarity to human-invented stories in automatic storytelling systems. The found patterns are in line with narratological models, and the results provide numerical quantification and layout of story components. The proposed method of story analysis is tested over two additional sources, the ROCStories corpus and stories generated by automated storytellers, to illustrate the valuable insights that may be derived from them.

The Effectiveness of the Short Story Writing Program in Developing Students' Creative Writing Skills

“…This research uses experimental method with a quasi-experimental design and a quantitative approach to reveal the impact of the short story writing program on students' creative writing abilities (Gu, 2018;León et al, 2020). The focus of the analysis is fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration in short stories.…”

“…Literature helps students to write more creatively. Several studies with the theme of creative writing, including action research to improve creative writing teaching skills using short stories (Joseph et al, 2020;León et al, 2020;Synnes et al, 2021). This research was conducted at the junior high school level.…”

“…Fluency means how quickly and easily a person comes up with new creative ideas. Flexibility means the ability to see and consider things from different and opposing points of view, to take old concepts and organize and reuse them in new ways, and to turn existing ideas around (León et al, 2020;Sari et al, 2017). Originality means the ability to come up with ideas that are unique, unusual, strange or unnatural.…”

Evolutionary Combination of Subplot Patterns into Meaningful Plots

“…Any process of computational construction of stories is likely to yield a large number of potential stories, so there is a need for some means of measuring the quality of drafts that can help identify valuable candidates among this search space. There have been numerous efforts to develop valid metrics for story quality (León et al, 2020;Gervás et al, 2021), but they all show that the perception of quality for narratives is greatly influenced by many subjective matters such as emotion, attribution of motivation, empathy. .…”