Suspense is one key feature in modern storytelling. One of the mechanisms to deliver a suspensefu... more Suspense is one key feature in modern storytelling. One of the mechanisms to deliver a suspenseful experience to an audience is by means of controlling the information provided. The media, however, has a very strong impact on what kind of information can be delivered and how. Moreover, modern storytelling is usually conveyed interactively, in such a way that the audience is also part of the story. In this paper, we experiment and analyse the different impact of information management in interactive and non-interactive storytelling. We report on an experiment measuring the reported perceived amusement in interactive and non-interactive versions of a potentially suspenseful story, and we provide evidence that a passive, non-interactive audience usually prefers less information than an active interactive audience. The study provides informed insight on how these results could be used in real scenarios to deliver appropriate levels of information to enhance the perception of suspense.
In this paper we present a system for automatic story generation that reuses existing stories to ... more In this paper we present a system for automatic story generation that reuses existing stories to produce a new story that matches a given user query. The plot structure is obtained by a case-based reasoning (CBR) process over a case base of tales and an ontology of explicitly declared relevant knowledge. The resulting story is generated as a sketch of a plot described in natural language by means of natural language generation (NLG) techniques.
A model is proposed showing how automatically extracted and manually written association rules ca... more A model is proposed showing how automatically extracted and manually written association rules can be used to build the structure of a narrative from real-life temporal data. The generated text's communicative goal is to help the reader construct a causal representation of the events. A connecting associative thread allows the reader to follow associations from the beginning to the end of the text. It is created using a spanning tree over a selected associative sub-network. The results of a text quality evaluation show that the texts were understandable, but that flow between sentences, although not bad, could still be improved.
La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones par... more La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones para la indexación automática de documentos clínicos mediante el uso de recursos lingüísticos avanzados y de tecnologías de procesamiento del lenguaje.
ABSTRACT Suspense is a key narrative issue in terms of emotional gratification, influencing the w... more ABSTRACT Suspense is a key narrative issue in terms of emotional gratification, influencing the way in which the audience experiences a story. Virtually all narrative media uses suspense as a strategy for reader engagement regardless of the technology or genre. Being such an important narrative component, computational creativity has tackled suspense in a number of automatic storytelling. These systems are mainly based on narrative theories, and in general lack a cognitive approach involving the study of empathy or emotional effect of the environment impact. With this idea in mind, this paper reports on a computational model of the influence of decorative elements on suspense. It has been developed as part of a more general proposal for plot generation based on cognitive aspects. In order to test and parameterise the model, an evaluation based on textual stories and an evaluation based on a 3D virtual environment was run. In both cases, results suggest a direct influence of emotional perception of decorative objects in the suspense of a scene.
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Jun 5, 2010
Man achieved flight by studying how birds fly, and yet the solution that engineers came up with (... more Man achieved flight by studying how birds fly, and yet the solution that engineers came up with (jet planes) is very different from the one birds apply. In this paper I review a number of efforts in automated story telling and poetry generation, identifying which human abilities are being modelled in each case. In an analogy to the classic example of bird-flight and jet planes, I explore how the computational models relate to (the little we know about) human performance, what the similarities are between the case for linguistic creativity and the case for flight, and what the analogy might have to say about artificial linguistic creativity if it were valid.
This paper presents SentiSense, a concept-based affective lexicon. It is intended to be used in s... more This paper presents SentiSense, a concept-based affective lexicon. It is intended to be used in sentiment analysis-related tasks, specially in polarity and intensity classification and emotion identification. SentiSense attaches emotional meanings to concepts from the WordNet lexical database, instead of terms, thus allowing to address the word ambiguity problem using one of the many WordNet-based word sense disambiguation algorithms. SentiSense consists of 5,496 words and 2,190 synsets labeled with an emotion from a set of 14 emotional categories, which are related by an antonym relationship. SentiSense has been developed semi-automatically using several semantic relations between synsets in WordNet. SentiSense is endowed with a set of tools that allow users to visualize the lexicon and some statistics about the distribution of synsets and emotions in SentiSense, as well as to easily expand the lexicon. SentiSense is available for research purposes.
Cr eativity and storytelling are two ideas that one does not naturally associate with computers. ... more Cr eativity and storytelling are two ideas that one does not naturally associate with computers. Yet over the last few years there has been a surge of research efforts concerning the combination of both subjects. This article tries to shed light on these efforts. In carrying out this program, one is handicapped by the fact that, as words, both creativity and storytelling are severely lacking in the precision one expects of words to be used for intellectual endeavor. If a speaker were to mention either word in front of an audience, each person listening would probably come up with a different mental picture of what is intended. To avoid the risks that such vagueness might lead to, an initial effort is made here to restrict the endeavor to those aspects that have been modeled computationally in some model or system. The article then proceeds to review some of the research efforts that have addressed these problems from a computational point of view. The Creative Process Thinking of "creativity" evokes several ideas that seem to go together. It generally brings up the idea of someone generating something new. But it also has connotations that whatever is generated must be somewhat unexpected or different from what others might have produced. There is also an implicit restriction that what is generated satisfy some goal, though in many cases the particular goal implied is not altogether clear. The fact that someone is involved indicates we are reviewing an explicit action by some agent that we shall refer to as the creator. A sunset may generate a totally new combination of colors, possibly unexpected, but it would not be considered creative. The fact that something is generated indicates that the creative action Articles
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Jul 16, 2015
Existing models of the writing task from a cognitive viewpoint agree on the importance of draft r... more Existing models of the writing task from a cognitive viewpoint agree on the importance of draft revision in the overall process. This is generally assumed to focus on reviewing intermediate drafts in search for feedback on how to modify them to match the driving constraints. However, in literary creativity it is often the case that the feedback leads not to a revision of the current draft but to a redefinition of the constraints that are driving the process. This phenomenon is explicitly described in Sharples' model of writing as a creative task. Yet existing computational models of literary creativity do not contemplate it. The present paper describes a computational model of the creative processes in literary creativity that contemplates the explicit representation of the constraints driving the process, and allows for the feedback from the validation to modify not just the ongoing draft but also the constraints that it is expected to satisfy. This allows the model to represent cases of serendipitous discovery of interesting features.
International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2001
The paper is intended to analyze the artistic conception of the poem-"Anthem for Doomed Youth", t... more The paper is intended to analyze the artistic conception of the poem-"Anthem for Doomed Youth", through such four aspects as song beauty, figures of speech, images and contrasts. It is profound and far-reaching, which expresses poet's anger to the war and the deep mourning for the dead, just as the author says: "The subject of it is war, and the pity of war."
Nowadays, there is a significant amount of the population that have problems when communicating t... more Nowadays, there is a significant amount of the population that have problems when communicating through written text. This means that many people are in high risk of social exclusion as they find themselves without access to key forms of communication such as writing and reading. Besides, this form of communication has become more relevant in relation to new technologies. This paper focuses on providing a tool for translating Spanish text into pictograms that aims to facilitate access to written information for people who cannot use natural language due to physical or mental disabilities. In order to improve the obtained translations we have used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The evaluation of the system effectively confirms that obtained translations are not only accurate but closer to human-made translations than the ones obtained by a similar tool.
The purpose of this paper is to describe a data model that has been used in the construction of a... more The purpose of this paper is to describe a data model that has been used in the construction of a lexical database for Spanish. This lexical resource takes the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) as the theoretical basis, especially lexical functions (LF), which associate a lexical unit (LU) to values that express a specific meaning related to that LF for that LU. We have developed a database, called BaDELE3000, for the 3,000 most frequently used nouns in Iberian Spanish. We followed a systematic process for the design, so that the lexical data are well structured and separated from the applications that might use them. This way, the features of the data model and the subsequent database make them useful for different purposes such as word sense disambiguation, machine translation and text generation.
The plots of stories are known to follow general patterns in terms of their overall structure. Th... more The plots of stories are known to follow general patterns in terms of their overall structure. This was the basic tenet of structuralist approaches to narratology. Vladimir Propp proposed a procedure for the generation of new tales based on his semi-formal description of the structure of Russian folk tales. This is one of the first existing instances of a creative process described procedurally. The present paper revisits Propp's morphology to build a system that generates instances of Russian folk tales. Propp's view of the folk tale as a rigid sequence of character functions is employed as a plot driver, and some issues that Propp declared relevant but did not explore in detail-such as long-range dependencies between functions or the importance of endings-are given computational shape in the context of a broader architecture that captures all the aspects discussed by Propp. A set of simple evaluation metrics for the resulting outputs is defined inspired on Propp's formalism. The potential of the resulting system for providing a creative story generation system is discussed, and possible lines of future work are discussed.
Suspense is one key feature in modern storytelling. One of the mechanisms to deliver a suspensefu... more Suspense is one key feature in modern storytelling. One of the mechanisms to deliver a suspenseful experience to an audience is by means of controlling the information provided. The media, however, has a very strong impact on what kind of information can be delivered and how. Moreover, modern storytelling is usually conveyed interactively, in such a way that the audience is also part of the story. In this paper, we experiment and analyse the different impact of information management in interactive and non-interactive storytelling. We report on an experiment measuring the reported perceived amusement in interactive and non-interactive versions of a potentially suspenseful story, and we provide evidence that a passive, non-interactive audience usually prefers less information than an active interactive audience. The study provides informed insight on how these results could be used in real scenarios to deliver appropriate levels of information to enhance the perception of suspense.
In this paper we present a system for automatic story generation that reuses existing stories to ... more In this paper we present a system for automatic story generation that reuses existing stories to produce a new story that matches a given user query. The plot structure is obtained by a case-based reasoning (CBR) process over a case base of tales and an ontology of explicitly declared relevant knowledge. The resulting story is generated as a sketch of a plot described in natural language by means of natural language generation (NLG) techniques.
A model is proposed showing how automatically extracted and manually written association rules ca... more A model is proposed showing how automatically extracted and manually written association rules can be used to build the structure of a narrative from real-life temporal data. The generated text's communicative goal is to help the reader construct a causal representation of the events. A connecting associative thread allows the reader to follow associations from the beginning to the end of the text. It is created using a spanning tree over a selected associative sub-network. The results of a text quality evaluation show that the texts were understandable, but that flow between sentences, although not bad, could still be improved.
La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones par... more La finalidad del proyecto AutoIndexer es el desarrollo de una infraestructura de aplicaciones para la indexación automática de documentos clínicos mediante el uso de recursos lingüísticos avanzados y de tecnologías de procesamiento del lenguaje.
ABSTRACT Suspense is a key narrative issue in terms of emotional gratification, influencing the w... more ABSTRACT Suspense is a key narrative issue in terms of emotional gratification, influencing the way in which the audience experiences a story. Virtually all narrative media uses suspense as a strategy for reader engagement regardless of the technology or genre. Being such an important narrative component, computational creativity has tackled suspense in a number of automatic storytelling. These systems are mainly based on narrative theories, and in general lack a cognitive approach involving the study of empathy or emotional effect of the environment impact. With this idea in mind, this paper reports on a computational model of the influence of decorative elements on suspense. It has been developed as part of a more general proposal for plot generation based on cognitive aspects. In order to test and parameterise the model, an evaluation based on textual stories and an evaluation based on a 3D virtual environment was run. In both cases, results suggest a direct influence of emotional perception of decorative objects in the suspense of a scene.
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Jun 5, 2010
Man achieved flight by studying how birds fly, and yet the solution that engineers came up with (... more Man achieved flight by studying how birds fly, and yet the solution that engineers came up with (jet planes) is very different from the one birds apply. In this paper I review a number of efforts in automated story telling and poetry generation, identifying which human abilities are being modelled in each case. In an analogy to the classic example of bird-flight and jet planes, I explore how the computational models relate to (the little we know about) human performance, what the similarities are between the case for linguistic creativity and the case for flight, and what the analogy might have to say about artificial linguistic creativity if it were valid.
This paper presents SentiSense, a concept-based affective lexicon. It is intended to be used in s... more This paper presents SentiSense, a concept-based affective lexicon. It is intended to be used in sentiment analysis-related tasks, specially in polarity and intensity classification and emotion identification. SentiSense attaches emotional meanings to concepts from the WordNet lexical database, instead of terms, thus allowing to address the word ambiguity problem using one of the many WordNet-based word sense disambiguation algorithms. SentiSense consists of 5,496 words and 2,190 synsets labeled with an emotion from a set of 14 emotional categories, which are related by an antonym relationship. SentiSense has been developed semi-automatically using several semantic relations between synsets in WordNet. SentiSense is endowed with a set of tools that allow users to visualize the lexicon and some statistics about the distribution of synsets and emotions in SentiSense, as well as to easily expand the lexicon. SentiSense is available for research purposes.
Cr eativity and storytelling are two ideas that one does not naturally associate with computers. ... more Cr eativity and storytelling are two ideas that one does not naturally associate with computers. Yet over the last few years there has been a surge of research efforts concerning the combination of both subjects. This article tries to shed light on these efforts. In carrying out this program, one is handicapped by the fact that, as words, both creativity and storytelling are severely lacking in the precision one expects of words to be used for intellectual endeavor. If a speaker were to mention either word in front of an audience, each person listening would probably come up with a different mental picture of what is intended. To avoid the risks that such vagueness might lead to, an initial effort is made here to restrict the endeavor to those aspects that have been modeled computationally in some model or system. The article then proceeds to review some of the research efforts that have addressed these problems from a computational point of view. The Creative Process Thinking of "creativity" evokes several ideas that seem to go together. It generally brings up the idea of someone generating something new. But it also has connotations that whatever is generated must be somewhat unexpected or different from what others might have produced. There is also an implicit restriction that what is generated satisfy some goal, though in many cases the particular goal implied is not altogether clear. The fact that someone is involved indicates we are reviewing an explicit action by some agent that we shall refer to as the creator. A sunset may generate a totally new combination of colors, possibly unexpected, but it would not be considered creative. The fact that something is generated indicates that the creative action Articles
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Jul 16, 2015
Existing models of the writing task from a cognitive viewpoint agree on the importance of draft r... more Existing models of the writing task from a cognitive viewpoint agree on the importance of draft revision in the overall process. This is generally assumed to focus on reviewing intermediate drafts in search for feedback on how to modify them to match the driving constraints. However, in literary creativity it is often the case that the feedback leads not to a revision of the current draft but to a redefinition of the constraints that are driving the process. This phenomenon is explicitly described in Sharples' model of writing as a creative task. Yet existing computational models of literary creativity do not contemplate it. The present paper describes a computational model of the creative processes in literary creativity that contemplates the explicit representation of the constraints driving the process, and allows for the feedback from the validation to modify not just the ongoing draft but also the constraints that it is expected to satisfy. This allows the model to represent cases of serendipitous discovery of interesting features.
International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2001
The paper is intended to analyze the artistic conception of the poem-"Anthem for Doomed Youth", t... more The paper is intended to analyze the artistic conception of the poem-"Anthem for Doomed Youth", through such four aspects as song beauty, figures of speech, images and contrasts. It is profound and far-reaching, which expresses poet's anger to the war and the deep mourning for the dead, just as the author says: "The subject of it is war, and the pity of war."
Nowadays, there is a significant amount of the population that have problems when communicating t... more Nowadays, there is a significant amount of the population that have problems when communicating through written text. This means that many people are in high risk of social exclusion as they find themselves without access to key forms of communication such as writing and reading. Besides, this form of communication has become more relevant in relation to new technologies. This paper focuses on providing a tool for translating Spanish text into pictograms that aims to facilitate access to written information for people who cannot use natural language due to physical or mental disabilities. In order to improve the obtained translations we have used Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The evaluation of the system effectively confirms that obtained translations are not only accurate but closer to human-made translations than the ones obtained by a similar tool.
The purpose of this paper is to describe a data model that has been used in the construction of a... more The purpose of this paper is to describe a data model that has been used in the construction of a lexical database for Spanish. This lexical resource takes the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) as the theoretical basis, especially lexical functions (LF), which associate a lexical unit (LU) to values that express a specific meaning related to that LF for that LU. We have developed a database, called BaDELE3000, for the 3,000 most frequently used nouns in Iberian Spanish. We followed a systematic process for the design, so that the lexical data are well structured and separated from the applications that might use them. This way, the features of the data model and the subsequent database make them useful for different purposes such as word sense disambiguation, machine translation and text generation.
The plots of stories are known to follow general patterns in terms of their overall structure. Th... more The plots of stories are known to follow general patterns in terms of their overall structure. This was the basic tenet of structuralist approaches to narratology. Vladimir Propp proposed a procedure for the generation of new tales based on his semi-formal description of the structure of Russian folk tales. This is one of the first existing instances of a creative process described procedurally. The present paper revisits Propp's morphology to build a system that generates instances of Russian folk tales. Propp's view of the folk tale as a rigid sequence of character functions is employed as a plot driver, and some issues that Propp declared relevant but did not explore in detail-such as long-range dependencies between functions or the importance of endings-are given computational shape in the context of a broader architecture that captures all the aspects discussed by Propp. A set of simple evaluation metrics for the resulting outputs is defined inspired on Propp's formalism. The potential of the resulting system for providing a creative story generation system is discussed, and possible lines of future work are discussed.
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Papers by Pablo Gervás