Computational Drafting of Plot Structures for Russian Folk Tales

• Published in: Cognitive computation Vol. 8; no. 2; pp. 187 - 203
• Main Author: Gervás, Pablo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.04.2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Automation; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Computation by Abstract Devices; Computational Biology/Bioinformatics; Folklore; Morphology; Narratology; Neurosciences; Plot (Narrative); Storytelling; Computational creativity; Computational narratology; Storytelling; Knowledge representation
• ISSN: 1866-9956; 1866-9964
• DOI: 10.1007/s12559-015-9338-8

The plots of stories are known to follow general patterns in terms of their overall structure. This was the basic tenet of structuralist approaches to narratology. Vladimir Propp proposed a procedure for the generation of new tales based on his semi-formal description of the structure of Russian folk tales. This is one of the first existing instances of a creative process described procedurally. The present paper revisits Propp’s morphology to build a system that generates instances of Russian folk tales. Propp’s view of the folk tale as a rigid sequence of character functions is employed as a plot driver, and some issues that Propp declared relevant but did not explore in detail—such as long-range dependencies between functions or the importance of endings—are given computational shape in the context of a broader architecture that captures all the aspects discussed by Propp. A set of simple evaluation metrics for the resulting outputs is defined inspired on Propp’s formalism. The potential of the resulting system for providing a creative story generation system is discussed, and possible lines of future work are discussed.