Most storytelling systems to date rely on manually coded knowledge, the cost of which usually restricts such systems to operate within a few domains where knowledge has been engineered. Open Story Generation systems are capable of learning knowledge necessary for telling stories in a given domain. In this paper, we describe a technique that generates and communicates stories in language with di...

The development of virtual story-telling is an ever ongoing process. As long as it does not perform on the same level as a human storyteller, there is room for improvement. The Virtual Storyteller, a project of the HMI department of the University of Twente, uses a Text-to-Speech application that creates synthetic speech from text input. It is definitely not a trivial matter to make synthetic s...

In this paper, we describe the results of the evaluation of a Virtual Character, used as a human-like, automated narrator with focus on the signaling of suspenseful situations within stories to the Virtual Narrator’s audience. Signaling is done via facial expression and gestures, driven by an underlying story examination mechanism. This mechanism uses an automatic generated story to get points ...

We present the Narrator, a Natural Language Generation component used in a digital storytelling system. The system takes as input a formal representation of a story plot, in the form of a causal network relating the actions of the characters to their motives and their consequences. Based on this input, the Narrator generates a narrative in Dutch, by carrying out tasks such as constructing a Doc...

This paper presents a corpus targeting evaluative meaning as it pertains to descriptions of events. The corpus, POLITICAL-ADS is drawn from 141 television ads from the 2008 U.S. presidential race and contains 3945 NPs and 1549 VPs annotated for scalar sentiment from three different perspectives: the narrator, the annotator, and general society. We show that annotators can distinguish these pers...

"Paganism not only holds a solution to our environmental crisis ... it can bring about a revolution in the way our culture makes sense of reality. For Paganism puts us back in touch with the body; by reconnecting our wordy analytical culture with the physical self, Paganism brings us back to the Earth" (Harris, 1995: 149). Stirring stuff, certainly, but does the rhetoric hold? Though I first sp...

Algeria’s economic crisis parallels and is an intrinsic part of its political crisis over the past decade. It consists, furthermore, of an interrelated crisis over control of the economic rent and the activities of an informal parallel economy originally based on smuggling and now sustained through violence which is legitimised by Islamist rhetoric. Economic reform, therefore, cannot be meaning...

In this paper I argue against the theory – popular among theorists of narrative artworks – that we must posit a fictional narrative agent in every narrative artwork in order to explain our imaginative engagement with such works. I accept that every narrative must have a narrator, but I argue that in some central literary cases the narrator is not a fictional agent, but rather the actual author ...