Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
BOOK, and they created a simple narrative planner capable of gen-
erating stories for which the synopses had already been specified. So
STORYBOOK starts its story-writing process with a narrative plan,
which is a logical representation of the characters, objects, descriptions
and actions in a story. The narrative plan charts the details—the who,
what, when, where, why and how of a story, along with the order of
events. The story generation process then consists of making these de-
tails conform to the synopsis.
BRUTUS
While STORYBOOK clearly represented progress relative to the pro-
grams of the late 1980s, the most advanced storytelling machine at the
time of writing is BRUTUS, developed by Selmer Bringsjord at Rensse-
laer Polytechnic Institute and a small team of collaborators. 12 BRUTUS
has been endowed with a database of information about the world and
the language of academia, and it can create stories that are intriguing
and somewhat mysterious, with betrayal being their common underly-
ing theme (hence the program's name). Bringsjord and Ferrucci were
able to devise a formal mathematical representation of betrayal, which is
defined in terms of the beliefs, goals and actions of two characters, the
betrayer and the betrayed. Other themes that BRUTUS “understands”
include evil, self-deception and voyeurism.
In addition to its knowledge of themes such as betrayal, BRUTUS
also possesses more general knowledge of the domain of its stories (acad-
emia), relating to the various aspects and topics of academic life—knowl-
edge about such topics as professors, students, classes, theses, etc. And
BRUTUS is endowed with various types of linguistic knowledge, such
as word forms, the rules of English syntax, and how to structure para-
graphs. The program also has knowledge of two types of grammar. One
type is story grammars, 13 which includes knowledge of the principles of
storytelling, such as how to cause the reader to empathize with the char-
acters. The other type of grammar is literary grammars , which are used
to capture the logical structure and style of creative prose.
BRUTUS' story generation process employs all this knowledge and
more, in a four-stage process. First the program sets the stage for its
12 David Ferrucci at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Marie Meteer at Bolt, Beranek
and Newman, and David Porush, a colleague at Rensselaer.
13 See the earlier section on TALE-SPIN.
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