Toward a Computational Model of Narrative

Narratives structure our understanding of the world and of ourselves. They exploit the shared cognitive structures of human motivations, goals, actions, events, and outcomes. We report on a computational model that is motivated by results in neural computation and captures fine-grained, context sensitive information about human goals, processes, actions, policies, and outcomes. We describe the use of the model in the context of a pilot system that is able to interpret simple stories and narrative fragments in the domain of international politics and economics. We identify problems with the pilot system and outline extensions required to incorporate several crucial dimensions of narrative structure.