A Semantic Foundation for Mixed-Initiative Computational Storytelling

In mixed-initiative computational storytelling, stories are authored using a given vocabulary that must be understood by both author and computer. In practice, this vocabulary is manually authored ad-hoc, and prone to errors and consistency problems. What is missing is a generic, rich semantic vocabulary that is reusable in different applications and effectively supportive of advanced narrative reasoning and generation. We propose the integration of lexical semantics and commonsense knowledge and we present GluNet, a flexible, open-source, and generic knowledge-base that seamlessly integrates a variety of lexical databases and facilitates commonsense reasoning. Advantages of this approach are illustrated by means of two prototype applications, which make extensive use of the GluNet vocabulary to reason about and manipulate a coauthored narrative. GluNet aims to promote interoperability of narrative generation systems and sharing corpus data between fields of computational narrative.