RULE FORMS FOR VERSE, SENTENCES, AND STORY TREES

Rule forms and their interpreters are described for deriving sensible and nonsensical verse, for analyzing sentences into case structures, for generating sentences from case structures, and for generating story trees. A system of inference rules and assertions in the form of Horn clauses and their interpreter are presented as a computational method for generating narrative story trees that have the property that their terminal propositions form the story, while nodes closer to the root provide summaries. The story trees and their generator are proposed as a promising computational model for the macrostructure theorized by Kintsch and van Dijk to account for a human reader's memory and understanding of narrative text.