A thematic approach to emerging narrative structure
Summary (3 min read)
Introduction
- Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1 [Models and Principles]: General.
- Keywords Narrative, Narrative Generation, Thematics, Emergent Structures.
1. I%TRODUCTIO%
- User generated content on the web (such as blog entries, photos, videos, etc) are often accompanied by explicit virtual structures in the form of tags (overlapping named collections) and other domain-specific collections such as albums (for photos), channels (for videos) and reading lists (for books).
- These explicit structures give rise to other emergent structures sometimes refereed to as folksonomies, such as emergent vocabularies (e.g. tag clouds) and taxonomies (e.g. Wikipedia categories).
- Narrative generation is a field that seeks to explore alternative representations of narrative, and investigate the possibility of automatically generating custom stories from information collections.
- It is their belief that the thematic approach would generate richer stories that benefit from a thematic subtext.
2.1.1 Structuralism
- Narratology is the study of narrative within literature.
- Structuralism is an approach to narrative analysis that aims to deconstruct narrative and to learn about the components from which a story is built and how they are connected and contrasted against each other within a narrative work.
- The discourse however represents what parts of the story are told and how it is told; if the collection is the story then the result of narrative generation (telling the story) is the discourse.
- A motif is the smallest atomic thematic element and refers to an individual element with the narrative which connotes in some way the theme.
2.1.2 Semiotics
- Semiotics or semiology is the study of signs and how the authors extract meaning from them.
- Saussure wrote that all signs are built of two parts [9], a signifier (the physical signal from the sign such as the appearance of an apple) and a signified (the denotation of that sign such as the concept of ‘apple-ness’ or ‘fruit’).
- Barthes made a distinction between denotative signs (signifiers that lead directly to their signified, such as a word having a literal meaning) and connotative signs (signifiers that lead indirectly to some contextual or culturally important signified, such as the red light implying Stop to a driver) [5].
- Barthes goes on to point out that should a sign connote something then the signifier of such a sign would itself be built out of a denotative sign (a picture of a red light denotes a red light, red light connotes Stop).
- In such a way the authors can draw contextual cultural concepts from static basic objects that in a particular context have a greater meaning.
2.2 %arrative Systems
- Narrative generation has been the focus of a wide range of systems, varying in both their methods and application.
- Some systems use narrative generation techniques as a way of adding more meaning to information, for example Topia [3] where search results are presented as a discourse.
- While existing techniques often succeed in generating narratives they have several drawbacks.
- Narratives generated from story grammars are heavily bound to the rules of a given genre and become very formulaic, and emergent narratives can seem like a bland account of a set of actions as the generation is based on a simple report of what happened in sequence, and as such lacks emphasis and flavor.
- If direction, emphasis, or the authorial voice could be incorporated into generated narratives then it would lead to less bland or formulaic stories.
3.1 The Model
- This subtext gives a narrative direction beyond merely communicating a chronology leading to deeper narratives and giving an authorial voice to stories.
- The authors assume a situation where a story is compiled with many small segments of narrative that are structured together, in this case the selection of these small atomic segments and their content are key to communicating a theme.
- Themes are connoted by other themes and motifs Features denote Motifs because motifs are directly associated with the feature (normally as a generalized version of it).
- Using an appropriately populated thematic model the authors could examine the features of those natoms in order to identify motifs and thus potential themes.
3.2 An Example
- There is a hierarchy of themes (white boxes), motifs (grey boxes) and features (dark grey boxes) under the overall themes of Celebration and Spring.
- Furthermore motifs may be denoted by any number of features, the example shows how a party motif could be denoted from either a Champagne feature or a Balloon feature.
4. %ARRATIVES AS EMERGE%T STRUCTURES
- To evaluate the feasibility of applying this model and generating narratives from virtual collections the authors decided to survey some existing collections to see how natoms were tagged, with features, motifs, or themes.
- Using the example above the authors searched for images on Flickr1 with each feature, motif, and 1 http://www.flickr.com theme, searched for tags of items only, and comprised a table of the average number of results for each main theme (Celebration and Spring) from the example.
- The results are in Table 1, Averages rounded to nearest value.
- Any motif can be denoted by a wide range of features, so for any given motif there may be more feature tags in total then tags for the motif itself.
6. REFERE%CES
- Automatic Ontology-based Knowledge Extraction and Tailored Biography Generation from the Web. IEEE Inteligent Systems, 18, 14-21. [2].
- Folksonomies versus Automatic Keyword Extraction: An Empirical Study.
- Procceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 81-84. [8].
- Story Creation by Inteligent Agents, also known as The Virtual Storyteller.
- Four Essays, also known as Russian Formalist Criticism.
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37 citations
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Cites methods from "A thematic approach to emerging nar..."
...We propose the use of the thematic model presented in [12] to improve the thematic cohesion in systems that utilise narrative which will then enrich the resulting narratives, which can make them more relevant thematically, and giving them more subtextual depth....
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...This model was first presented in [12], and then further explored how it could be utilised by narrative systems in [13]....
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12 citations
Cites background from "A thematic approach to emerging nar..."
...Thematics however, is an aspect largely un-modelled by most narrative generation systems and as such something we would expect to score lowly, we are pursuing this area in our own work elsewhere [8][9][10]....
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...In previous work we have explored the concept of modelling themes in narrative [8][9][10] and how we might model individual motifs and their connection to different themes to enable embedding themes in narrative generation or thematic analysis....
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11 citations
Cites background from "A thematic approach to emerging nar..."
...However, while .ltered Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for pro.t or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the .rst…...
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References
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2,450 citations
"A thematic approach to emerging nar..." refers background in this paper
...Saussure wrote that all signs are built of two parts [9], a signifier (the physical signal from the sign such as the appearance of an apple) and a signified (the denotation of that sign such as the concept of ‘apple-ness’ or ‘fruit’)....
[...]
1,260 citations
"A thematic approach to emerging nar..." refers background in this paper
...Structuralism asserts that a narrative may be deconstructed into a story and a discourse [4] where the story represents a chronology of all the information to be communicated and the discourse represents what parts of the story are told and how those parts are presented (shown in Figure 1)....
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...When a narrative is formed a part of the story is selected and then presented as a discourse [4]....
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525 citations
"A thematic approach to emerging nar..." refers background in this paper
...Examples of such emergent narratives are Façade [8] and the Virtual Storyteller [10]....
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...Examples of such emergent narratives are Façade [8] and the Virtual Storyteller [10]....
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...Façade: An Experiment in Building a FullyRealized Interactive Drama....
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Frequently Asked Questions (7)
Q2. What is the meaning of structural analysis?
Structuralism is an approach to narrative analysis that aims to deconstruct narrative and to learn about the components from which a story is built and how they are connected and contrasted against each other within a narrative work.
Q3. What is the main purpose of the narrative generation techniques?
Somesystems use narrative generation techniques as a way of adding more meaning to information, for example Topia [3] where search results are presented as a discourse.
Q4. What is the aim of the virtual storyteller?
In other systems, such as the virtual storyteller [10], the aim is to completely generate an entertaining story rather the represent existing content.
Q5. What is the reason why the authors have not found enough tags for a given theme?
Their initial survey of online collections has indicated that a thematic approach should be possible, although it is not yet clear whether there would be enough tags relating to features (which are more flexible than tags that relate to motifs/themes) to create narratives with an arbitrary theme.
Q6. What are the two types of narratives used to generate?
There are many different methods used to generate narrative but they largely fall into two types; grammar narratives, and emergent narratives.
Q7. What are the common types of structures that are used to generate narratives?
These explicit structures give rise to other emergent structures sometimes refereed to as folksonomies, such as emergent vocabularies (e.g. tag clouds) and taxonomies (e.g. Wikipedia categories).