Related papers: The Dynamical Principles of Storytelling
There is increasing evidence that human activity in general, and narrative in particular, can be treated as a dynamical system in the physics sense; a system whose evolution is described by an action integral, such that the average of all…
Storytelling algorithms aim to 'connect the dots' between disparate documents by linking starting and ending documents through a series of intermediate documents. Existing storytelling algorithms are based on notions of coherence and…
Writers generally rely on plans or sketches to write long stories, but most current language models generate word by word from left to right. We explore coarse-to-fine models for creating narrative texts of several hundred words, and…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
We study the performance of different methods for processing information, incorporating narrative selection within an evolutionary model. All agents update their beliefs according to Bayes' Rule, but some strategically choose the narrative…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
The development of plot or story in novels is reflected in the content and the words used. The flow of sentiments, which is one aspect of writing style, can be quantified by analyzing the flow of words. This study explores literary works as…
The temporal statistics exhibited by written correspondence appear to be media dependent, with features which have so far proven difficult to characterize. We explain the origin of these difficulties by disentangling the role of spontaneous…
We explore story generation: creative systems that can build coherent and fluent passages of text about a topic. We collect a large dataset of 300K human-written stories paired with writing prompts from an online forum. Our dataset enables…
Like any other logical theory, domain descriptions in reasoning about actions may evolve, and thus need revision methods to adequately accommodate new information about the behavior of actions. The present work is about changing action…
Automatic storytelling is challenging since it requires generating long, coherent natural language to describes a sensible sequence of events. Despite considerable efforts on automatic story generation in the past, prior work either is…
Random walks with memory typically involve rules where a preference for either revisiting or avoiding those sites visited in the past are introduced somehow. Such effects have a direct consequence on the statistics of first-passage and…
It is well known that sequential decision making may lead to information cascades. That is, when agents make decisions based on their private information, as well as observing the actions of those before them, then it might be rational to…
Lifelong experiences and learned knowledge lead to shared expectations about how common situations tend to unfold. Such knowledge of narrative event flow enables people to weave together a story. However, comparable computational tools to…
Statistical thinking partially depends upon an iterative process by which essential features of a problem setting are identified and mapped onto an abstract model or archetype, and then translated back into the context of the original…
A path information is defined in connection with the probability distribution of paths of nonequilibrium hamiltonian systems moving in phase space from an initial cell to different final cells. On the basis of the assumption that these…
The Anna Karenina Principle (AKP) holds that success requires satisfying a small set of essential conditions, whereas failure takes diverse forms. We test AKP, its reverse, and two further patterns described as ordered and noisy across…
Consider n agents forming an egalitarian, self-governed community. Their first task is to decide on a decision rule to make further decisions. We start from a rather general initial agreement on the decision-making process based upon a set…
Sentence is a basic linguistic unit, however, little is known about how information content is distributed across different positions of a sentence. Based on authentic language data of English, the present study calculated the entropy and…
Comprehending procedural text, e.g., a paragraph describing photosynthesis, requires modeling actions and the state changes they produce, so that questions about entities at different timepoints can be answered. Although several recent…