Abstract
The authors propose the conceptual design of a co-creative narrative generation system that co-creates a collection of diverse narratives from a narrative generation program and people. The long-term goal of this study is to vitalize humans' narrative creation by developing generative narrative technology. The key idea is to connect and unify individual narrative productions by many agents, including one or more computer programs and humans, via a collection of narratives produced and accumulated by these agents. Simultaneously, a co-creative narrative generation system is the practice of a computational approach to narratology as a model for the social system of narrative production. This chapter describes the basic concepts of the co-creative narrative generation system.
TopBackground
This section considers two perspectives for providing background information. The first subsection reviews the history of studies on narrative generation systems. The second subsection discusses the significance of narrative and narrativity for artificial intelligence (AI) and informatics.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Narrative Discourse: The structural aspect of how a story is expressed. In this study, a discourse is represented not as surface expression, but as a formal description.
Computational Creativity: Research field that addresses computer-based modeling, design, simulation, and implementation of creativity. Research subjects include various creative areas, such as arts, entertainment, artifacts, content, ideas, and knowledge.
Narrative Expression: Surface expression of a narrative by a medium such as natural language, still or moving image, and music, or their combination.
Co-Creation: Cooperative process for producing novel and valuable artifacts or information through mutual action among two or more individuals.
Narrative Generation System: Computer program that produces some types of narratives.
Three-Layered Narrative Interface: The concept of a user interface for accessing a collection of narratives. A three-layered narrative interface provides multiple perspectives on a collection of narratives: collective, surface, and internal.
Collection of Narratives: Narratives produced in the co-creative narrative generation system are accumulated in this part and shared by the narrative generation program and human users.
Story: The content information of a narrative, in particular, a chronologically ordered sequence of events.
Story World: The background world information of a story, including characters, objects, and places.
Narrative-Based Narrative Generation: To generate a new narrative based on previously generated narratives. This is the basic concept of a generative program for the co-creative narrative generation system.
Narrative: Product that represents one or more events by some media for humans, or some formal descriptions for computers. In this study, a narrative is constructed as the totality of a story world, story, discourse, and expression.