A Modular Approach to Story Generation

One way of characterising texts is in terms of the discourse structures on which they appear to be built. Each type of text, or genre, e.g. the sports report, the recipe, the sermon, the proverb, will have associated with it a characteristic organisation of units. In this paper, a general model of the structure of one text type, the story, is described. This model forms the basis of a program which combines the general story structure principles with rules governing a particular sub-genre, the Old French epic, in order to generate story summaries.