Visualization of character’s intentions in dramatic media

Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2012

This paper addresses the annotation of the narrative features of media objects. Based on a relevant narratological and computational background, we introduce an ontology-based model called Drammar, an annotation schema for the narrative features of media objects based on Drammar and a software tool, Cinematic, for annotating these objects and validating the annotation. Annotated media objects can also be automatically edited into sequences, with the twofold goal of testing the validity of the annotation-through the reconstruction of the baseline sequence-and exploring the possibility of alternative sequences. The software tool encodes both the narrative model and the annotation itself in ontological format, and relies on external ontologies for representing world knowledge and limit the arbitrariness of the annotation. The paper opens the way to the design of a general annotation schema for narrative multimedia with the long-term goal of building large corpora of annotated video material and of bridging the gap between the low-level signal analysis and the high-level semantic representation of the narrative content of the media objects. Finally, the paper illustrates a few projects elaborated with the Drammar annotation and the Cinematic tool, with purposes of artistic research and cross-media analysis, that provide an empirical validation of the annotation process.

2016

Although theoretical models of the structure of narrative arising from systematic analysis of corpora are available for domains such as Russian folk tales, there are no such sources for the plot lines of musical theatre. The present paper reports an effort of knowledge elicitation for features that characterise the narrative structure of plot in the particular domain of musical theatre. The following aspects are covered: identification of a valid vocabulary of abstract units to use in annotating musical theatre plots, development of a procedure for annotation - including a spread-sheet format for annotators to use, and a corresponding set of instructions to guide them through the process - selection of a corpus of musical theatre pieces that would constitute the corpus to be annotated, the annotation process itself and the results of post-processing the annotated corpus in search for insights on the narrative structure of musical theatre plots.

Visible …, 2011

Abstract: In this paper, we expand on our presentation at ICDS2010 (Dobson et al., 2010) in describing the design of several new forms of interactive visualization intended for teaching the concept of plot in fiction. The most common visualization currently used for teaching ...

2006

A key issue in interactive storytelling is how to generate stories which are, at the same time, interesting and coherent. On the one hand, it is desirable to provide means for the user to intervene in the story. But, on the other hand, it is necessary to guarantee that user intervention will not introduce events that violate the rules of the intended genre. This paper describes the usage of a plan recognition / plan generation paradigm in LOGTELL, a logic-based tool for the interactive generation and dramatization of stories. We focus on the specification of a formal logic model for events and characters' behaviour and on how the tool helps the interactive composition of plots through the adaptation of fully or partially generated plots. Based on the model, the user can interact with the tool at various levels, obtaining a variety of stories agreeable to individual tastes, within the imposed coherence requirements. The system alternates stages of goal inference, planning, plan recognition, user intervention and 3D visualization. Our experiments have shown that the system can be used not only for entertainment purposes but also, more generally, to help in the creation and adaptation of stories in conformity with a specified genre.

2002

New communication technologies can be used in the design of multimedia communication artifacts to support the early stage of a creative process: the heuristic project. In this work we give a proof of concept of an application addressed to a specific kind of heuristic project: given the logical sequence of episodes of a narrative, the fabula, the goal is to obtain different plots expressed in multi-modal language. The case study is provided by the task of transposing a written synopsis to the multi-modal language of a movie. We adopted the semiotic theory of Greimas to analyze the narrative and reveal its deep structure. The application enables users to interact with this structure in order to simulate and anticipate the effects of meaning resulting from their manipulation.

In this paper, we describe the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) within an emotional planner to support Interactive Storytelling. Our emotional planner is based on a standard HSP planner, whose originality is drawn from altering the agents' beliefs and emotional states. Each character is driven by its own planner, while characters are able to operate on their reciprocal feelings thus affecting each other. Our baseline story is constituted by a classic XIX th century French novel from Gustave Flaubert in which characters feelings play a dominant role. This approach benefits from the fact that Flaubert has described a specific ontology for his characters feelings. The objective of NLP should be to uncover from natural language utterances the same kind of affective elements, which requires an integration between NLP and the planning component at the level of semantic content. This research is illustrated with examples from a first fully integrated prototype comprising NLP, emotional planning and real-time 3D animation.

the AAAI Spring Symposium on Creative Intelligent …

2021

Narrative Extraction from text is a complex task that starts by identifying a set of narrative elements (actors, events, times), and the semantic links between them (temporal, referential, semantic roles). The outcome is a structure or set of structures which can then be represented graphically, thus opening room for further and alternative exploration of the plot. Such visualization can also be useful during the on-going annotation process. Manual annotation of narratives can be a complex e↵ort and the possibility o↵ered by the Brat annotation tool of annotating directly on the text does not seem su ciently helpful. In this paper, we propose Brat2Viz, a tool and a pipeline that displays visualization of narrative information annotated in Brat. Brat2Viz reads the annotation file of Brat, produces an intermediate representation in the declarative language DRS (Discourse Representation Structure), and from this obtains the visualization. Currently, we make available two visualization ...