Story Planning with Vignettes: Toward Overcoming the Content Production Bottleneck

Storytelling is prominent part of the daily lives of humans. Entertainers, educators, and trainers often concern themselves with the production of novel stories for entertainment, education, and training. However, it is possible for the consumption of story content by end-users to outpace the rate of production of story content. One solution is to instill greater creativity in computer systems in the form of story generation. We present an incremental advancement to planning-based story generation that increases the space of narratives that can be automatically searched in an attempt to make planning-based story generation more creative. The VB-POCL story planning algorithm implements a form of case-based planning that can incorporate vignettes – plot fragments that are a priori known to be “good” – into a narrative planning process. We show that VB-POCL can generate narratives with favorable structural properties that cannot be generated reliably with previous attempts at planning-based narrative generation.