Empirical determination of basic heuristics for narrative content planning

Abstract

Stories are sequential in nature but they are used to package human experience that involves many things happening at the same time, to several people or in several locations. The mechanics of this packaging process constitute an instance of content planning that has not ben addressed in sufficient detail in existing NLG work. The present paper reviews a number of traditional stories in the light of the basic concepts of narratology that would be involved in the decisions involved in planning the content for tellings of these stories, proposes a number of basic principles to understand what is happening, and explores a possible way in which these principles may translate to basic heuristics for narrative content planning.