Reports on the 2011 AAAI Fourth Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference Workshops

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture, one of the fundamental frameworks by which people view the world and comprehend their experiences. As computers and the Internet play an ever-increasing role in social interaction, education, and entertainment, they introduce novel opportunities for sharing, creating, and understanding stories. The last several years have seen growing interest and progress in computational approaches to narrative intelligence. New systems are increasingly able to organize and present information in a manner that leverages narrative techniques across a range of media. Additionally, the long-standing AI goal of narrative understanding — automatically finding narrative meaning from a set of facts — has seen new interest and urgency with the rapid growth of online knowledge and communication. Intelligent narrative technologies enable computational systems to communicate with human users in compelling and intuitive ways by utilizing peoples’ inherent capacity for understanding stories. The AIIDE workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies was the latest in a series of events designed to bring together AI researchers, narratologists, psychologists, artists, and industry practitioners to create a forum for discussing narrative intelligence in an interdisciplinary setting. The previous three gatherings were associated with the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium Series, AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium Series, and the 5th International Articles