A Commonsense Knowledge Base for Generating Children’s Stories

This paper presents our work in developing a commonsense knowledge source based on semantic concepts about objects, activities and their relationships in a child’s daily life. This commonsense ontology is then used by our automatic story generator to output children's stories of the fable form from a given input picture. The generated story is a narration of the events of a basic plot that flows from negative to positive (rule violation to value acquisition), using themes that are familiar to children. The paper ends with descriptions of further investigations that are underway to extend the system, including using a formal upper ontology to represent storytelling knowledge, and the generation of stories from a given set of sequential scenes.