Tools for Representing and Processing Narratives

Abstract

Narratives describe and link events. Narratives are pervasive. The representation of the handling of a project or life experiences are narratives (i.e., it is we that draw the links). Some suggest that Web sites should be designed considering visits as narratives. In research in museology, it has become popular to consider visiting a museum as a narrative. Narrative is stressed in some approaches to diagnosis (including in knowledge acquisition for intelligent systems). It stands to reason that handling narratives should loom large in information processing, or at the very least in artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, after the 1980s (during the “AI Winter”), AI retreated from a concern with narratives. However, narrative has leaked since then into other domains of computing, such as human interface design and multimedia (e.g., in tools for assisting in the editing of videos). Computational or computer tools for handling crime analysis and legal evidence need be aware of legal scholars’ work on legal narratives and how to apply argumentation to their reconstruction. Ethical arguments are applied in a narrative context. Consider computer crime events: hypothetical reconstruction constructs possible narratives to match what actually happened. We focus on AI tools for analyzing or generating narratives. We also devote a section of this article to organizational storytelling, which sometimes uses databases of stories.