Merits of a Temporal Modal Logic for Narrative Discourse Generation

Abstract

Just as there exists varied uses for computational models of narrative, there exists a wide variety of languages aimed at representing stories. A number of them have historic roots in automated generation, for which these languages have to be limited in order to make the generation process computationally feasible. Other are focused on story understanding, with close ties to natural language making many reasoning processes computationally intractable. In this paper, we discuss the trade-off between expressivity and computational complexity of the reasoning process and argue that Impulse, a temporal, modal logic provides more expressivity than languages historically associated with story generation, while still affording reasoning capabilities. We show that these properties enable certain aspects of narrative discourse generation by using two examples from different genres, and claim that this generalizes to a broader class of problems.