Course details

8.3426

Computational Story Generation

 S
WS 2019 M. Sc. Leonid Berov
2h/wk
4 ECTS 		B.Sc modules:
CS-BWP-AI - Artificial Intelligence
KOGW-WPM-KI - Artificial Intelligence
M.Sc modules:
CC-MWP-AI - Artificial Intelligence
CS-MWP-AI - Artificial Intelligence
KOGW-MWPM-KI - Major subject Artificial Intelligence
 Mon: 12-14

In this course you will learn about computational story generation, that is, the effort to create software that acts creatively in the domain of literature. Fictional stories are complex phenomena that the humanities have been trying to understand for at least two thousand years: they have synthetic properties, like a plot and an intended effects, which are stable, but also mimetic ones, like believable characters in a story world, which change over time. In order to be able to create novel and interesting stories by computational means, one also needs a preferably holistic computational representation of story, which is a non-trivial challenge. Thus, in this course we will first dive into Literary Theory and Narratology to gain a grounded understanding of what a story is. We will then engage with foundational papers from computational creativity theory to analyse what constitutes a computational system that we would deem to be creative. Finally, we will look at classic as well as contemporary papers that actually deal with systems that generate stories, and discuss them in the light of what we previously learned. Pre-requisites - Basic theoretic knowledge in AI, basic experience in programming - Willingness to read the course material on a regular basis (yes, I know this is hard 😉 )