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- among other things - ways in which story databases can be used to trans-
fer informal knowledge (Lawrence & Thomas 1999). Cassell and Smith's Vic-
torian Laptop combines a story database with a storytelling support system.
As people write their own travel stories, the system retrieves matching stories
from a database of Victorian travel narratives, allowing them to compare their
experiences with those of travelers from the past (Cassell & Smith 1999).
Story-understanding systems
Story-understanding systems seek to model the processes by which a human
“understands” a story. “Understanding” is usually operationalized as the abil-
ity to answer questions about a story where the answers are not explicitly given
within the story, or as the ability to paraphrase or summarize a story. In or-
der to perform these tasks, story-understanding systems form representations
of stories more amenable to manipulation than the surface form, make con-
nections between the stories and some context or background knowledge, and
possibly have models of story event importance. Research in story understand-
ing began during AI's classical engagement with narrative (see the section “A
Brief History of Narrative Intelligence” above). Even after the shift in AI re-
search agendas following the AI Winter, a small stream of such work continued
(e.g. Cox 1996). This body of work plays an important role within NI. By ex-
ploring what it means to be the kind of system (either natural or artificial) that
understands stories, this work can help inform the design of agents and inter-
faces that make use of narrative. For example, Sack's work on automatically
understanding ideological bias of news stories highlights the importance for
narrative of understanding not only the content of what is said, but also the
viewpoint that leads it to be told in particular ways (Sack 2001).
In “Stories and social networks,” Sack develops a story-understanding sys-
tem which focuses not on the story itself, but on understanding how people
use stories socially and to construct identity.
Story generation systems
Storytelling systems seek to model the knowledge and processes necessary to
tell a story. Following Bailey (Bailey 1999), work in storytelling systems can be
divided into three major groups: author-centric, story-centric, and character-
centric systems (Bailey refers to character-centric systems as world models).
Author-centric systems model the thought processes of an author. Character-
centric systems model the goals and plans of characters; stories result from
