title: Computational Drafting of Plot Structures for Russian Folk Tales.
abstract: The plots of stories are known to follow general patterns in terms of their overall structure. This was the basic tenet of structuralist approaches to narratology. Vladimir Propp proposed a procedure for the generation of new tales based on his semi-formal description of the structure of Russian folk tales. This is one of the first existing instances of a creative process described procedurally. The present paper revisits Propp's morphology to build a system that generates instances of Russian folk tales. Propp's view of the folk tale as a rigid sequence of character functions is employed as a plot driver, and some issues that Propp declared relevant but did not explore in detail-such as long-range dependencies between functions or the importance of endings-are given computational shape in the context of a broader architecture that captures all the aspects discussed by Propp. A set of simple evaluation metrics for the resulting outputs is defined inspired on Propp's formalism. The potential of the resulting system for providing a creative story generation system is discussed, and possible lines of future work are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Tecnología del Conocimiento, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-4906-9837
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Gervás
keywords: Computational creativity; Computational narratology; Knowledge representation; Storytelling