Exploring Baselines for Combining Full Plots into Multiple-plot Stories
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Exploring Baselines for Combining Full Plots into Multiple‑plot Stories Eugenio Concepción1 · Pablo Gervás2 · Gonzalo Méndez2 Received: 18 March 2020 / Accepted: 9 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Many of the stories at the core of narrative entertainment involve a number of plot lines that combine to give them interest. The present paper sets out to solve the problem of how several different plot lines, each one of them complete in its own sense, can be combined into a single linear sequence that works reasonably well as a plot. Starting from a brief review of how existing storytelling systems address the task, a representation for plots and plot templates is proposed that allows the combination of several subplots into a single-plot line. Four strategies for weaving plots are proposed, two taken from literary studies and two computational baselines, and a formative evaluation of a set of stories produced by these solutions is presented. Finally, open issues, promising avenues of future work and the relation to previous work, are discussed. Keywords Artificial intelligence · Computational creativity · Automatic story generation
Introduction Many of the narrative forms that feature highly for their entertainment value in Western culture (Shakespearean comedies, Hollywood movies, TV series, and nineteenth century novels) share the characteristic of involving a number of plot lines that combine to give them interest. Many of these established forms rely on mechanisms for * Eugenio Concepción [email protected] Pablo Gervás [email protected] Gonzalo Méndez [email protected] 1
Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
2
Instituto de Tecnología del Conocimiento, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
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Vol.:(0123456789)
New Generation Computing
artfully combining several narrative threads into a single linear sequence, so that audiences can easily follow the overall story. Given the relative importance of this mechanism for so much of our ability to communicate, it is surprising to find how little research has focused on understanding the computational principles that govern it. The present paper sets out to solve the problem of how several different plot lines, each one of them completes in its own sense, can be combined into a single linear sequence that works reasonably well as a plot. An example of the type of combination desired is the popular solution for a Hollywood plot that combines an impending catastrophe that threatens to destroy the world, the attempts of several characters to survive the coming cataclysm, insights into the personal love interests of some of these characters, and often the recovery of damaged family relations between them.1 The paper relies on an existing storytelling system capable of generating single plots [8] to construct stories by combining more than one plot line. For the purpose of exploring the possible ways of creating stories in such way, an analysis on several plot combination strategies has been performed, consideri
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