The field of narrative (or story) understanding and generation is one of the oldest in natural
language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) which is hardly surprising since
storytelling is such a fundamental and familiar intellectual and social activity. In recent
years the demands of interactive entertainment and interest in the creation of engaging
narratives with life-like characters have provided a fresh impetus to this field. This book
provides an overview of the principal problems approaches and challenges faced today in
modeling the narrative structure of stories. The book introduces classical narratological
concepts from literary theory and their mapping to computational approaches. It demonstrates
how research in AI and NLP has modeled character goals causality and time using formalisms
from planning case-based reasoning and temporal reasoning and discusses fundamental
limitations in such approaches. It proposes new representations for embedded narratives and
fictional entities for assessing the pace of a narrative and offers an empirical theory of
audience response. These notions are incorporated into an annotation scheme called NarrativeML.
The book identifies key issues that need to be addressed including annotation methods for long
literary narratives the representation of modality and habituality and characterizing the
goals of narrators. It also suggests a future characterized by advanced text mining of
narrative structure from large-scale corpora and the development of a variety of useful
authoring aids. This is the first book to provide a systematic foundation that integrates
together narratology AI and computational linguistics. It can serve as a narratology primer
for computer scientists and an elucidation of computational narratology for literary theorists.
It is written in a highly accessible manner and is intended for use by a broad scientific
audience that includes linguists (computational and formal semanticists) AI researchers
cognitive scientists computer scientists game developers and narrative theorists. Table of
Contents: List of Figures List of Tables Narratological Background Characters as
Intentional Agents Time Plot Summary and Future Directions
