Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale as a Grammar for Generation
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The semi-formal analysis of Russian folk tales carried out by Vladimir Propp has often been used as theoretical background for the automated generation of stories. Its rigour and its exhaustive description of the constituent elements of Russian folk tales, and the enumeration of the patterns they follow, have acted as inspiration for several story generation systems, both sequential and interactive. Yet most of these efforts have attempted to generalize Propp’s account to types of stories beyond the corpus that it arose from. In the process, a number of the valuable intuitions present in the original work are lost. The present paper revisits Propp’s morphology to build a system that generates instances of Russian folk tales. Propp’s view of the folk tale as a rigid sequence of character functions is employed as a plot driver. Unification is used to incrementally build a conceptual representation of discourse by adding to an ongoing draft story actions that instantiate the character functions. Story actions are defined by pre and post conditions on the state of the plot to account for the causal relations crucial to narrative. The potential of the resulting system for providing a generic story generation system is discussed and possible lines of future work are discussed.
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Propp's formalism constitutes a blue-print for a story generation system intended to reproduce a particular model of story, while adhering to specific genre and domain conventions.
“Propp's formalism constitutes a blue-print for a story generation system intended to reproduce a particular model of story, while strongly adhering to specifi c genre and domain conventions .”
From The Thirty-One Functions in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale: An Outline and Recent Trends in the Applicability of the Proppian Taxonomic Model (2017) · cites this paper as Gervás, 2013
Gervás (2013) builds a system that generates instances of Russian folk tales using Propp's view on story generation.
“The work of Pablo Gervás, (2013) builds a system that generates instances of Russian folk tales and takes recourse to Propp's own view on how his morphology could be used for story generation.”
From The Thirty-One Functions in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale: An Outline and Recent Trends in the Applicability of the Proppian Taxonomic Model (2017) · cites this paper as Gervás, 2013
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- Authors
- Gervás, P.
- Affiliations
- Universidad Complutense de Madrid (ES)
- Corresponding author
- Gervás, Pablo
- ORCID
- Gervás, Pablo
- Venue
- Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
- Publisher
- Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik
- Published
- 2013
- Pages
- 122
- OpenAlex
- W2244347575
- Cited by
- 60
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 3
- FWCI
- 6.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- drops.dagstuhl.de
- Licence
- Locations
- DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- OASIcs : OpenAccess Series in Informatics (cc-by)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence in Games
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Narrative Theory and Analysis
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI-based Problem Solving and Planning
- Keywords
- Russian folk tales, story generation, character function, unification, narrative generation
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