Generation of Humorous Situations in Cartoons through Plan-based Formalisations

Introduction Digital Storytelling aims at developing techniques for the automatic generation of narratives by computers, in the form of computer animations. In evaluating the quality of the stories produced, there has been some work dedicated to modelling suspense [Young, 1999] or the emotions of characters [Gratch and Mrasella, 2001]. However, virtually no work has addressed the characterisation of comic situations within these narratives and how they can be generated. The principal AI technique for digital storytelling is planning [Badler et al., 1996], as it describes the high-level behaviour of characters through action selection, and as a story can be described as a sequence of causally related actions. In this work, we attempt to characterise comic situations in digital storytelling through the planning formalisms used to generate the story. This formalisation also has the potential to gain a better understanding of some mechanisms of comedy in specific genres. In this research we use cartoons as an investigation field.