Computer Aided Storytelling

Software	None
Covers	AI knowledge representation, narratology, psychology
Skills Required	Interest in artificial intelligence, ideally some interest in psychology and storytelling
Challenge	Conceptual ????? Technical ??? Programming

Brief Description

Computational storytelling has been the subject of science fiction stories and some artificial intelligence research. As a research challenge it presents fascinating opportunities to rigorously explore concepts that are hard to understand and even harder to represent in terms that a program can reason with. But there are potential applications for computational storytelling techniques if methods could be developed that worked, for instance in games, or in computer support for rapid scriptwriting for television.

The challenge of this project is to investigate the state of the art in artifical intelligence methods for constructing or modifying narratives, and the conceptual and practical difficulties in developing systems that might create interesting or useful narrative structures. This will involve considering what narratives and story-like structures like jokes actually are, and how they work. There has been a lot of research on this; notably on the structure and meaning of myths. Narratology - the study of narratives - is an academic field in its own right.

Variants

This project could be customized in various ways, to focus on particular applications for computer-generated narrative structures; or to focus on particular kinds of story-like structures.

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