Reading and Writing as a Creative Cycle: the Need for a Computational Model

The field of computational narratology has produced many efforts aimed at generating narrative by computational means. In recent times, a number of such efforts have considered the task of modelling how a reader might consume the story. Whereas all these approaches are clearly different aspects of the task of generating narrative, so far the efforts to model them have occurred as separate and disjoint initiatives. There is an enormous potential for improvement if a way was found to combine results from these initiatives with one another. The present position paper provides a breakdown of the activity of creating stories into five stages that are conceptually different from a computational point of view and represent important aspects of the overall process as observed either in humans or in existing systems. These stages include a feedback loop that builds interpretations of an ongoing composition and provides feedback based on these to inform the composition process. This model provides a theoretical framework that can be employed first to understand how the various aspects of the task of generating narrative relate to one another, second to identify which of these aspects are being addressed by the different existing research efforts, and finally to point the way towards possible integrations of these aspects within progressively more complex systems.