This paper challenges claims made by Scrum proponents when characterising the communicative nature of user stories: including being more 'authentic' because they comprise spoken language and that they are stories. We argue and decisively demonstrate that neither can be upheld. By incorrectly characterising user stories, we miss opportunities to understand what they are and how they work during ...

Preschool-aged children are exposed to fantasy stories with the expectation that they will learn messages in those stories that are applied to real-world situations. We examined children's transfer from fantastical and real stories. Over the course of 2 studies, 3½- to 5½-year-old children were less likely to transfer problem solutions from stories about fantasy characters than stories about re...

We present in this paper a constrained version of the problem of enumerating all maximal directed acyclic subgraphs (DAG) of a graph G. In this version, we enumerate stories, which are maximal DAGs whose sources and targets belong to a predefined subset of the nodes. First we show how to compute one story in polynomial-time, and we then describe two different algorithms to “tell” all possible s...

The linguistic fund, that is, the actual lexical inventory of a language, is always considerably larger than the sum total of the contents of dictionaries for that language. It corresponds to all the possibilities of derivation and compounding-with the associated word-formation rules. The exploitation of the latter. within machine-readable dictionaries should therefore allow a far more accurate...

When is a story just a story? When is a story much more than a story? When is the story we think we know obscuring a much richer story? These questions and more lay at the root of my lifelong quest to understand the power of story. Growing up in a southern rural community, I learned the art of storytelling from my family and neighbors. I often heard with some admiration, “She sure is a good sto...

Morals play an important role in why storytelling developed, and help provide stories with structure. We describe a storytelling system which generates short stories that convey one of six common morals identified in Aesop’s fables. Morals are represented in terms of patterns of character emotions that arise during the course of a story. To evaluate the system’s effectiveness, we compare system...