The Thematic Illustrator: An Automatic Illustrative Approach to Enhancing Narrative Cohesion

Authors: Hargood, C., Millard, D. and Weal, M.

Conference: ACM Hypertext 2011

Abstract:

Adaptive or generated narratives o?er personalised and dy- namic delivery of narrative content to users. However their generation or adaption is often based on the literal content of the narrative and not the subtext ignoring many impor- tant narrative principles such as narrative cohesion. Based on our existing work on a thematic model we present the Thematic Illustrator; a system capable of generating content relevant themed illustrations for short stories. The system aims to emphasise core themes and as a result improve the thematic cohesion of the story. We investigate whether this has a tangible e?ect on the cohesion of the narrative as a whole by using ?ve variables to measure the cohesion of a story with themed and unthemed illustrations. Our results show that thematic noise can be reduced and that there is a demonstrated link between thematic cohesion and some other aspects of narrative cohesion.

Source: Manual