Computational Narratology and Storytelling Variants

An intriguing phenomenon in human storytelling - inexhaustible source of inspiration for digital storytelling - is our ability to still recognize a story that the narrator has felt free to change to a considerable extent. However, observing how folktales have appeared and been disseminated through different countries along the centuries, we shall notice that our favorite stories have evolved no less dramatically in the course of the oral storytelling tradition. Founded on the classification of types and motifs contained in the Index of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, this research project attempts to understand how narrative variants emerge in order to create new narrative generation methods.

Status:

Contributions:
  • Proposed that variants are often the consequence of type interactions, which we characterize in terms of semiotic relations.
  • Described a conceptual basis for the development of narrative generation methods.
  • Proposed a computational system capable of generating new storytelling variants by applying the proposed semiotic relations.
  • Proposed a new plot generation method that can reuse existing stories to create new story variants.
Publications:
  • Edirlei Soares de Lima; Bruno Feijó; Antonio L. Furtado. Computational Narrative Blending Based on Planning. 20th IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC 2021), Coimbra, Portugal, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 13056, p. 289-303, 2021. [DOI]

  • Bruno Feijó; Edirlei Soares de Lima; Antonio L. Furtado. A Transdisciplinary Approach to Computational Narratology. Proceedings of the XX Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames 2021), Gramado, Brazil, 2021. [PDF]

  • Edirlei Soares de Lima; Bruno Feijó; Marco A. Casanova; Antonio L. Furtado. Storytelling Variants Based on Semiotic Relations. Entertainment Computing, v. 17, p. 31-44, 2016. [DOI] [PDF]

  • Best Paper Award Edirlei Soares de Lima; Antonio L. Furtado; Bruno Feijó. Storytelling Variants: The Case of Little Red Riding Hood. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC 2015), Trondheim, Norway, p. 286-300, 2015. [Best Paper Award] [DOI] [PDF]

  • Edirlei Soares de Lima; Antonio L. Furtado; Bruno Feijó. Types, Motifs and the Emergence of Variants. Proceedings of the XIV Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames 2015), Teresina, Brazil, p. 295-303, November 2015. ISSN: 2179-2259. [PDF]

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