Functional unit analysis: Framing and aesthetics for computational storytelling

Abstract

The plots of narratives can be analyzed by decomposition into functional units (FUs): complex structural elements that carry semantic meaning. A manual approach to the identification of FU using a graph-representation of plot has been proposed for human-made narratives, and on this basis used for plot summarization. A computational utilization, however, has remained inviable due to the complexity of the involved interpretative tasks. The present paper explores the use of the FU approach for the analysis of computationally generated narratives, because in this case interpretation can be evaded. It demonstrates that an agent-based approach to computational storytelling can be used to generate and aggregate all necessary plot phenomena in order to identify FUs. This is validated in-vivo by demonstrating that the extracted FU structure can be used to summarize, and aesthetically evaluate a plot; as has been predicted by the underpinning narrative theory. We argue that such an analysis is beneficial because it provides the system with an abstract, functional understanding of the generated artifacts, a step towards more-general intelligence. For instance, in the computational creativity domain it allows a system that has been formerly only capable of expression-type generative acts to also perform aesthetic- and framing-type generative acts. © 2019 CEUR-WS. All rights reserved.