Towards Narrative-Based Knowledge Representation in Cognitive Systems

The hypothesis according to which narrative is not only a prominent form of human communication but also a fundamental way to represent knowledge and to structure the mind has been limitedly but increasingly discussed for the last 40 years. However, in the realm of Artificial Intelligence, it did not lead to an elaborate model of knowledge representation, beyond scripts and cases. In this paper, we attempt to go further by identifying three differentiating features of narratives that may inspire novel forms of knowledge representation: transformation, conflict and unactualized events. In particular, these three features open the way for knowledge representation formalisms that take greater account of the co-existence of intertwined conflicting representations, with various validities and validity domains, beyond a purely factual representation of the world. 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.2 Artificial Intelligence