Intelligent Storytelling
Yun-Gyung Cheong, Associate Professor, Department of AI, College of Computing and Informatics, Sungkyunkwan University,South Korea
Course Type: Design and Technology-focused
Keywords: AI, NLP, Computational Models, Narrative Analysis
| University | Department | Level | Credits | Length | Medium |
| Sungkyunkwan University | Department of AI | Graduate | 3 | 15 | In-person |
Course Description
The goal of this course is to theoretically understand interactive stories and computationally model them to implement technologies for automatic analysis and creation of narratives. The curriculum includes story analysis based on narrative theory, various computational models applying artificial intelligence algorithms, authoring tools for creating interactive stories, and case studies implementing intelligent stories in VR and games. Students who take this course are expected to be able to design and implement systems that enhance user experience by adding story elements to the problems they want to solve.
Weekly Outline
Week 1. Course Introduction
Week 2. Narrative Analysis Theory
Week 3. Characters
Week 4. Conflict
Week 5. Narrative Time
Week 6. Genre
Week 7. Point of View
Week 8. AI Knowledge Representation and Inference
Week 9. AI Story Planning Algorithms
Week 10. Discourse and Presentation of Narrative
Week 11. Story Comprehension, Cognitive Science Theories
Week 12. Computational Models of Narrative, Story Datasets
Week 13. Paper presentation – Interactive Storytelling Applications
Week 14. Paper presentation – HCI
Week 15. Project presentation
Course Objectives
- To understand the concepts and terms of narrative analysis theory.
- To analyze stories and interactive stories using interdisciplinary narrative analysis theories.
- To build computational models to generate or analyze stories using technologies such as data analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning.
- To apply AI and NLP techniques to practical problems in interactive storytelling applications such as games and education.
Reading
- The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall (Book, 2012)
- Story: Style, Structure, Substance, & the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee (Book, 2010)
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell, (Book, 1949)
- The Writer’s Journey, Christopher Vogler (Book, 1992)
- Save The Cat, Blake Snyder (Book, 2005)
- 20 Master Plots, Tobias, (Book, 1993)
- 7 Basic Plots, Christopher Booker (Book, 2004)
- Morphology of the Folktale, Vladimir Propp (Book, 1928)
- Introduction to the theory of narrative, 4th ed., Mieke Bal (Book, 2017)
- Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, G. Genette (Book, 1983)
- Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, S. Chatman (Book, 1980)
- The Foundations of Screenwriting, Syd Field (Book, 2005)
- Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, Blake Snyder
- (Book, 2005)
- The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life, Noah Lukeman (Book, 2012)
- A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut (Book, 2005)
- Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Laurie Lamson (Book, 2014)
- Save the Cat: Write a Novel, Jessica Brody (Book, 2018)
- Dictionary of Narratology, Gerald Prince (Book, 2003)
- Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster (Book, 1927)
- The Story Grid, Shawn Coyne (Book, 2015)
- Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints, Nancy Kress (Book, 2005)
- The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. H. Porter Abbott (Book, 2008)
- Story understanding. In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Macmillan. Mueller, Erik T. (Book Chapter, 2002).
- Scripts, Plans and Knowledge, Schank, Roger C. and Robert P. Abelson., International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Paper, 1975)
- TALE-SPIN, James Meehan. An Interactive Program that Writes Stories. Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Paper, 1977).
- Facade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama, Mateas and Stern, In Game Developer’s Conference: Game Design Track, San Jose, California, (Paper, 2003).
Viewings
Viewings
- UP (Animation, 2009)
- Matrix (film, 1999)
- Parasite (film, 2019)
- Aningaaq (short film, 2013)
- Nobody (film, 2021)
- Sherlock (TV series, 2010-2017)
- As good as it gets (film, 1997)
- Star Wars (film, 1977)
- The Godfather (film, 1972)
- The Shawshank Redemption (film, 1994)
- Extraordinary Attorney Woo (TV series, 2022)
- Joker (film, 2019)
- Squid Game (Netflix series, 2021)
- Groundhog Day (film, 1993)
- Rashomon (film, 1950)
- The Usual Suspects (film, 1995)
- American Beauty (film, 1999)
- The Remarried Empress Fantas (Web novel, Webtoon, 2018~2020)
- Breaking Bad (TV series, 2008-2013)
- Memories of Murder (film, 2003)
- Money Heist (TV series, 2017-2021)
- Knives Out (film, 2019)
- The Sixth Sense (film, 1999)
- Mission: Impossible (film, 1996)
- You Have to Burn the Rope (fame, 2008)
- Conversations with Friends (Sally Rooney)
- The Handmaiden (film, 2016)
- 500 Days of Summer (film, 2009)
- Memento (film, 2000)
- The Others (film, 2016)
- Fight Club (film, 2001)
- Where is the Friends’ House? (film, 1987)
- Please Look After Mom (Novel, 2008)
- Love virtually (Novel, 2011)
- Die Hard (film, 2988)
- Sunspring (short film, 2016)
- The last of Us (Digital Game, 2010)
- Heavy Rain (Digital Game, 2010)
- Indigo Prophecy (Digital Game, 2005)
- Detroit: Become Human (Digital Game, 2013)
- Bioshock: Infinite (Digital Game, 2013)
- Back to the Future (film, 1985)
- Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (Interactive film, 2018)
- Play novel (Digital Game, 2022)
- Choose Love (Interactive film, 2023)
IDN Artifacts
- AI and NLP techniques
- Computational Models of Narrative
IDE and IDN Authoring Tools
- IDE: Python, NLP toolkit, Google Colaboratory
- chatGPT, LLMs
Major Assignments (being assignments whose value is of 25% or more)
Paper review and presentation (30%)
- Purpose: Cultivating the ability to independently read, study, and analyze the latest research papers on computational models, AI, and NLP that correspond to narrative theories learned in the class.
- Requirements: The presenter will give a summary of the paper in a 10-15 minute presentation, followed by the strengths and drawbacks of the research discussed by another student who plays the role of a reviewer in 5 minutes.
- Evaluation:
- Presentation
- Structure and Content: The presentation clearly explains the content, making it easily understandable for the audience. Verify that no critical details are missing. The presentation must cover the paper’s primary objectives, the problem it addresses, related research, methodologies employed, experiments and results, contributions to the field, and any limitations.
- Presentation Style: The structure and aesthetics of the presentation materials should be clean and visually appealing to maintain audience engagement.
- Presentation Delivery: Deliver the presentation at an appropriate pace to keep the audience engaged without rushing through or dragging the content. Avoid merely reading from the slides; instead, speak calmly, energetically, and engagingly to make the presentation lively and interesting. Strive for clarity and precision in explanations, ensuring they are insightful and appropriately paced to suit all audience members.
- Comprehension and Reference: Thoroughly understand the paper yourself before attempting to present it. This deep comprehension will enhance the quality of your presentation. If certain aspects of the paper are unclear from the content alone, consult additional references or background theories to better grasp and convey the material effectively.
- Presentation
- Reviewers evaluate the paper by discussing its strengths, including its novelty and contributions to the research or application field. They also identify any weaknesses or limitations. Additionally, they are encouraged to share the questions raised during their review and highlight areas needing improvement. Finally, they offer specific suggestions and outline potential directions to further enhance the quality of the paper.
- Paper List
Title | venue | Link |
The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes | EPJ Data Science | https://epjdatascience.springer open.com/articles/10.1140/epj ds/s13688-016-0093-1 |
Detecting Narrative Elements in Informational Text | NAACL 2022 | https://aclanthology.org/2022. findings-naacl.133/ |
The Construction of Situation Models in Narrative Comprehension: An Event-Indexing Model | Psychological Science 1995 | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4 0063035 |
Compute to Tell the Tale: Goal Driven Narrative Generation | Multimedia 2022 | https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1 145/3503161.3549202 |
“Let Your Characters Tell Their Story”: A Dataset for Character Centric Narrative Understanding | EMNLP 2021 | https://aclanthology.org/2021. findings-emnlp.150.pdf |
PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives | ACL 2023 | https://aclanthology.org/2023. acl-long.362/ |
Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing | ACL 2023 | https://aclanthology.org/2023. acl-long.486.pdf |
Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior | https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.034 42 | |
ATOMIC: An Atlas of Machine Commonsense for If-then Reasoning AAAI 2019 | https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/ AAAI/article/view/4160 | |
COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction | ACL 2019 | https://aclanthology.org/P19- 1470/ |
GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations | EMNLP 2020 | https://aclanthology.org/2020. emnlp-main.370/ |
Minding Language Models’ (Lack of) Theory of Mind:A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Tracker ACL 2023 | https://aclanthology.org/2023. acl-long.359/ | |
Automated storytelling via causal, commonsense plot ordering | AAAI | https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ AAAI/article/view/16733/165 40 |
COINS: Dynamically Generating COntextualized Inference Rules for Narrative Story Completion | ACL 2021 | https://aclanthology.org/2021. acl-long.395/ |
A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories | NAACL HLT 2016 | https://cs.rochester.edu/nlp/ro cstories/ |
STORIUM: A Dataset and Evaluation Platform for Machine-in the-Loop Story Generation | EMNLP 2020 | https://aclanthology.org/2020. emnlp-main.525/ |
Plot-guided Adversarial Example Construction for Evaluating Open domain Story Generation | NAACL 2021 | https://aclanthology.org/2021. naacl-main.343/ |
NARRASUM: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive Narrative Summarization | EMNLP 2022 | https://aclanthology.org/2022. findings-emnlp.14.pdf |
Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision EMNLP 2022 | https://aclanthology.org/2022. emnlp-main.296/ | |
DOC: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control | ACL 2023 | https://aclanthology.org/2023. acl-long.190/ |
Synthesizing Coherent Story with Auto-Regressive Latent Diffusion Models | SOTA model | https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.109 50 |
Pun Generation with Surprise | ACL 2019 | https://aclanthology.org/N19- 1172/ |
Genre-Controllable Story Generation via Supervised Contrastive Learning | WEB 2021 | https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145 /3485447.3512004 |
Go Back in Time: Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Temporal Prompts | NAACL 2022 | https://aclanthology.org/2022. naacl-main.104.pdf |
Are Fairy Tales Fair? Analyzing Gender Bias in Temporal Narrative Event Chains of Children’s Fairy Tales | ACL 2023 | https://aclanthology.org/2023. acl-long.359/ |
TaleBrush: Visual Sketching of Story Generation with Pretrained Language Models | CHI 2022 | https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1 145/3491102.3501819 |
Final Project (60%)
- Purpose: Applying the narrative theories and the computational models of narrative learned in the course to create and understand stories automatically, or to develop interactive story applications
- Requirements: The project shall contain Idea, the direct background of the idea, related work, method (model, framework, algorithm), example of operation (scenario). A team can consist of 1-2 members, but if a team is composed of 3 members, they must conduct data analysis, experiments, or system implementation.
- Evaluation:
- Contribution of the proposed Methods or Systems
- Novelty of the method
- Related research survey section should contain related narrative analysis theory, and previous research works similar to the proposed idea
- Technical soundness of methods (logically plausible) & evaluation
- Feasibility of the method
- Completeness of the idea
- Usability of the idea
- Team member role distribution
- Presentation (5-7 minutes presentation + 3 minutes Q&A)
Course Best Practices
- Narrative theory and computational theory are arranged in parallel, examining how the content learned theoretically is used to automatically create stories, and structured to expose students to the latest AI and NLP technologies.
- Two sessions per week: 75-minute video lecture session, 75-minute hands-on practice & paper presentation session (applying narrative theory to actual stories for analysis, presenting research on related computational models).
- <<use of additional lecture resources for offline studying>> YouTube videos that effectively demonstrate the application of narrative analysis theories learned in class to actual movie scenes.
- Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story (https://youtu.be/KxDwieKpawg) ○ The Secret to Great Characters — Characterization Explained (https://youtu.be/43Vrnaz8fYU)
- The Soul of Good Character Design (https://youtu.be/SM3IQFgP-d8)
- The Purpose of Conflict (https://youtu.be/6_sri6K_IoM)
- How to Create Story Conflict (https://youtu.be/z-CIZvS9NEg)
- Types of Foreshadowing in Films — What is Indirect vs. Direct Foreshadowing? (https://youtu.be/JOas2BLjPR4)
- What is a Red Herring — 5 Techniques to Mislead & Distract an Audience (https://youtu.be/47ntBElzaWk)
- Movie Genres Explained — Types of Films & the Art of Subverting Film Genres (https://youtu.be/rDVVE8ZHJ3o)
- The POV Shot — The Art of the Subjective Camera and “Point of View Shot” (https://youtu.be/BLCQAmTleP0)
- What is the Fourth Wall? The Best Examples of Breaking the Fourth Wall (https://youtu.be/PZL13w9TqbA)
- Your Script Is Missing This: Setups and Payoffs (https://youtu.be/qGDdpXLc1CQ)
- What is Theme — 5 Ways to Layer Theme into a Screenplay (https://youtu.be/9ELleu9J05g)
- <<relationship between course material and assignments>> Student participation and two small assignments constitute 10% of the overall grade. After taking lessons on narrative and character analysis theories, students are expected to apply these concepts to real-world stories. For each assignment, they analyze their favorite stories and produce concise reports demonstrating their understanding and application of the theories.
- <<dissemination options for students’ work>> The class, comprising 25 students, is organized into three groups for the final project presentation. Each group presented their work followed by peer reviews and Q&A sessions. This structure facilitates collaborative learning and enables students to receive constructive feedback from their classmates on their projects.