How (Not) To Minimize Events

When drawing conclusions about narratives, minimizing|to a reasonable extent|the occurrence of events is crucial. We argue that unguided minimization is insuucient in case events are causally connected, for it easily fails to distinguish unmotivated event occurrences from those that have a cause. Two solutions are ooered, the rst of which has the advantage of being straightforwardly realized but on the other hand has a restricted range of applicability. Our second solution overcomes these restrictions but requires two uncommon and novel features. First, event occurrences are identiied as uents, which allows to adapt a recent causality-oriented solution to the Ramiication Problem so that if an event is caused by another event then the former is obtained as indirect eeect of what caused the latter. Second, volitional actions and natural events which have no cause inside the reasoning context, are furnished with a special cause, namely, the reaching of the time-point at which they take place. We present both a high-level narrative description language and an axiomatization based on a novel Fluent Calculus in which is realized this solution to the event minimization problem.