A context-and scope-sensitive analysis of narrative data to aid the specification of agent behaviour

Abstract

A structure for analysing narrative data is suggested, one that distinguishes three parts in sequence: context (a heuristic to identify what knowledge is relevant given a kind of situation), scope (what is possible within that situation) and narrative elements (the detailed conditional and sequential structure of actions and events given the context and scope). This structure is first motivated and then illustrated with some simple examples taken from Sukaina Bharwani’s thesis (Bharwani 2004). It is suggested that such a structure might be helpful in preserving more of the natural meaning of such data, as well as being a good match to a context-dependent computational architecture, and thus facilitate the process of using narrative data to inform the specification of behavioural rules in an Agent-Based Simulation. This suggestion only solves part of the ‘Narrative Data to Agent Behaviour’ puzzle — this structure needs to be combined and improved by other methods and appropriate computational architectures designed to suit it.