A model of suspense for narrative generation

Richard Doust, Paul Piwek


Abstract
Most work on automatic generation of narratives, and more specifically suspenseful narrative, has focused on detailed domain-specific modelling of character psychology and plot structure. Recent work in computational linguistics on the automatic learning of narrative schemas suggests an alternative approach that exploits such schemas as a starting point for modelling and measuring suspense. We propose a domain-independent model for tracking suspense in a story which can be used to predict the audience’s suspense response on a sentence-by-sentence basis at the content determination stage of narrative generation. The model lends itself as the theoretical foundation for a suspense module that is compatible with alternative narrative generation theories. The proposal is evaluated by human judges’ normalised average scores correlate strongly with predicted values.
Anthology ID:
W17-3527
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Editors:
Jose M. Alonso, Alberto Bugarín, Ehud Reiter
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
178–187
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-3527
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-3527
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Richard Doust and Paul Piwek. 2017. A model of suspense for narrative generation. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 178–187, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A model of suspense for narrative generation (Doust & Piwek, INLG 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-3527.pdf