Story Generation and Aviation Incident Representation

This working note discusses the topic of story generation, with a view to identifying the knowledge required to understand aviation incident narratives (which have structural similarities to stories), following the premise that to understand aviation incidents, one should at least be able to generate examples of them. We give a brief overview of aviation incidents and their relation to stories, and then describe two of our earlier attempts (using ‘scripts’ and ‘story grammars’) at incident generation which did not evolve promisingly. Following this, we describe a simple incident generator which did work (at a ‘toy’ level), using a ‘world simulation’ approach. This generator is based on Meehan’s TALE-SPIN story generator [Meehan, 1977]. We conclude with a critique of the approach.