Page 93 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

collections of poems at the disposition of the public is still the only means of airing the work produced by these systems. The first collection of poems made up by the SPAR WASP system was presented in the Festival of Poets held in the Matadero, Madrid, on May 27 and 28 May, 2017.
Raconteur, an automatic narrator of real events
Raconteur [26] is a system that knows how to turn events into stories after being fed them
as abstract descriptions. The initial version is designed to read the algebraic notation of a game of chess, interpret it as though it were
the register of events that had happened to the pieces (which represent people), find which parts of the game could constitute an interesting story and generate corresponding text with which to tell it. This task is placed within the broadest context of an act of communication where there’s a ‘composer’, in charge of composing a linear discourse based on observable facts and an ‘interpreter’ whose task it is to reconstruct
a faithful representation of what has happened based on his interpretation of the received narrative discourse. The composition of a discourse involves a number of operations. First, what needs to be told should be organized by narrative threads and told from the point of view of a concrete character (in this case, a particular chess piece), as this is how people understand stories.
Secondly, not everything is related, only that which can be seen by certain characters (the protagonists). Consequently, only the narrative threads that best cover what has happened and which are most interesting should be chosen. Thirdly, if there are a number of protagonists, their stories should be combined in one narrative discourse. To achieve this, the narrative threads of the protagonists are cut in convenient places (leaving them in coherent fragments) and they are combined in a single meaningful sequence, easy for the reader to understand. Since each
additional element introduced to the discourse requires an effort on behalf of the reader, every- thing included in the story has to significantly contribute to achieving our communicative goal.
PropperWryter, a generator of musical plots
The PropperWryter system generates conceptual descriptions of narrative storylines. It was used to make up the storyline for the musical Beyond the Fence that premiered in London’s West End in February 2016. It was on for two weeks to mixed reviews. Propperwryter is a later version of a system that made up Russian stories [25b] based on the morphology of the story developed by Vladimir Propp [44]. In order to generate storylines for musicals, it learnt from a collection of musicals, focusing specifically on the structure of the plotlines. To make this possible, a group of
Fig. 2. Graph of the plotline for the musical Wicked, used as a reference for the PropperWryter program. On the horizontal axis, the abstractions used to describe the plot are shown while the lines correspond to the values assigned to different emotions as it evolves.
Fig. 3. Interface of the PropperWryter program, used to create the plot for the musical, Beyond the Fence.
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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