Information-Gathering Events in Story Plots

Abstract : Story plots must contain, besides physical action events, a minimal set of information-gathering events, whereby the various characters can form their beliefs on the facts of the mini-world in which the narrative takes place. In this paper, we present an approach to model such events within a plan-based storytelling context. Three kinds of such events are considered here, involving, respectively, inter-character communication, perception and reasoning. Multiple discordant beliefs about the same fact are allowed, making necessary the introduction of higher-level facilities to rank them and to exclude those that violate certain constraints. Other higher-level facilities are also available for pattern-matching against typical-plan libraries or previously composed plots. A prototype logic programming implementation is fully operational. A simple example is used throughout the presentation.