Character Beliefs in Story Generation

Abstract

Character beliefs play a central role in many narratives, but are often not represented in planning-based author-centered narrative generation systems, or only represented in an ad hoc way. In this paper we will discuss how actions in Dynamic Epistemic Logic that affect the story world as well as the characters' beliefs, can be used in the context of narrative generation. By using this logical foundation we can ensure that the actors' beliefs are maintained in a logically consistent way, but we will also discuss how our system supports writing these complex logical operations in a concise way. We will also show how our system, which has limited planning capabilities, can come up with simple stories that cause characters to have beliefs desired by the author, and how our approach can be integrated with other work in the field.