A Declarative Model for Simple Narratives

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This paper describes a declarative model for simple narratives. The model describes what it is about a sequence of events such that reporting the sequence constitutes a story. Previous work in story generation has followed one of two tracks: (1) declarative, or isolating the regular structure of stories and then creating text which conforms to that structure, and (2) procedural, that is, modeling and recreating the processes used by human authors. Frequently, researchers in first track were unable to point to a concrete implementation based upon their model; researchers in the second track did not directly address the question of what constitutes a story. By implementing a story grammar, we address both these difficulties.