Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
When one of the characters in a MINSTREL story encountered a
problem, the program solved the problem using a different approach to
the goal
subgoal method employed by Meehan. Instead MINSTREL
would find similar problem situations from its memory and apply the
solutions used in the past to the current problem. In this way the pro-
gram was able to discover new, creative solutions, by first finding a re-
lated problem that it was able to solve, then solving the slightly different
but related problem, and finally adapting the solution from the related
problem to enable it to solve the original one. For example, when MIN-
STREL was asked to create a story about a knight who commits suicide,
there were no stories in its memory about a “knight who purposefully
kills self ”, so the program modified “kills” to “injures”, and it modi-
fied “purposely” to “accidentally”, because it knew that it already had
a story about a knight who accidentally injured himself while killing a
troll. Once this earlier story had been recalled, it was modified to create
a scenario in which a knight purposefully kills himself by losing a fight
with a troll, thereby developing a newly-invented story fragment.
MINSTREL represented a definite conceptual advance on Meehan's
work of a decade earlier, but the stories it generated were only marginally
more interesting.
STORYBOOK
The mid-late 1990s saw a resurgence of interest in automatic story-
writing, principally because of significant improvements that had been
achieved by computer programs in the quality of their writing styles.
Whereas most of the earlier efforts in story writing had focussed on em-
ploying story grammars to design acceptable plots, more recent work
addressed writing quality, and to good effect.
One of the more successful of these projects was STORYBOOK, de-
veloped by Charles Callaway and James Lester at North Carolina State
University. STORYBOOK requires a considerable amount of knowl-
edge about the subject domain of the stories it is asked to generate, and
it also needs a narrative model, so setting up the system to produce a
story involves a significant time commitment, specifying the necessary
information about the structure of the story and the world in which it
takes place.
Callaway and Lester chose fairy-tales set in the world of “Little Red
Riding Hood” as the domain in which to develop and test STORY-
Search WWH ::




Custom Search