Poetics 19 (1990) 37-63 37

North-Holland

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE STUDY

OF LITERARY NARRATIVE

Nancy M. IDE and Jean Vl?RONIS *

This paper tries to show that some cross-fertilization between the fields of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and literary studies could be beneficial to both fields. Consideration of what is required to
understand literary narrative can provide both a new set of challenging AI problems and greater
insight into the mechanisms that contribute to the meaning of narrative texts in general. Literary
studies can also benefit by re-casting their assumptions and theories in terms formal enough to
lead to experiments on computers. We show that current AI models of story understanding
require some fundamental changes in order to handle literary narrative, in areas such as the
representation of sentence meaning, the understanding of a text’s purpose and themes, the
derivation of meaning from non-narrative textual features, and the need for more explicit and
flexible models of the reader’s activity, goals, and abilities. We propose a general model of
understanding that requires an interpreter capable of simulating different readers and operating at
a level outside and surrounding those of current AI models.

1. Introduction

Over the past decade and a half, a body of research called ‘story understand-
ing’ has evolved within the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal of this
research is typically to enable computers to create an internal representation
of the ‘meaning’ of a story, which can then be used in tasks such as question
answering, paraphrase, or synopsis. Such attempts to formalize the processes
of comprehension and represent the meaning of a text in computationally
implementable ways have provided a perspective on problems of narrative
comprehension that can contribute to our understanding of human compre-
hension processes, even though most AI work is not intended to model them
explicitly. AI work has shed much light on what is required to understand
narrative and the relationships between different kinds of information found
in a text, as well as on the amount and kind of information used or acquired
during the process of comprehension. For this reason research in story

* Authors’ addresses: Nancy M. Ide, Dept. of Computer Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie,
New York, 12601, USA, ide@vassar.bitnet; Jean Veronis, Groupe Representation et Traitement
des Connaissances, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 31 Chemin Joseph Aiguier,
13402 Marseille cedex 9, France, veronis@frmopll.bitnet

0304-422X/90/$3.50 0 1990, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

38 N.M. Ide, J. Vhronis / AI and literary narraiiue

understanding is of interest to anyone concerned with the ways in which texts

yield meaning, or the ways in which readers go about discovering that
meaning.
The AI work done so far has less relevance for those interested specifically
in literary texts, primarily because the texts used in early research efforts are
necessarily restricted to very small universes, are syntactically and stylistically
simplistic, and are therefore markedly ‘non-literary’. However, research in the
field has progressed far enough that it is valuable for literary scholars both to
examine its results so far and to consider how current approaches to story
understanding must be extended in order to deal with literary texts. To this
end, this paper will review the AI work that seems most fruitful for literary
study, outline some of the complications introduced by taking literary texts as
the object of study, and suggest, in very broad terms, what might need to be
considered for a computational model of the processing and representation of
literary narrative. The focus in this discussion will be on literary narrative
rather than literature in general, in order to build easily on models for story
understanding and limit somewhat the range of textual features and problems
that must be considered.

2. Artificial Intelligence approaches to story understanding

Work in the area of story understanding can be seen as having progressed,

over its life within the field of AI in the past fifteen years or so, through
several major phases, corresponding to broad developments in the conception
of what is required for narrative understanding. Oversimplifying slightly for
the sake of clarity, we can use these phases as a framework for an introduction
and overview of the field. In this section we will outline these developments
and discuss, in general terms, their implementations in one or more story
understanding systems. Those interested in a more thorough treatment of story
understanding should consult the bibliography at the end of this paper.

2.1. Story grammars

One of the first computational approaches to a theory of stories was proposed

by Rumelhart (1973, who postulated that stories have an internal structure
just as simple sentences have an internal structure, and that, consequently, the
linguistic notion of well-formedness could be extended to stories. For instance,
the first several rules in the grammar

Stoly -+ Setting + Episode

Setting -+ (State *)
Episode + Event + Reaction
Reaction + Internal Response + Overt Response
 N.M. Ide, J. VPronis /AI and literary narralive 39

Overt Response - {Action 1(Attempt) *}

Attempt + Plan + Application
Application + (Preaction) * + Action + Consequence
Consequence + {Reaction 1Event}

describe the overall configuration of a story as consisting of a Setting and an

Episode; a Setting as consisting
Episode as an Event followed by
Plan are the terminal elements
accompanied by semantic rules
ments; for instance, the rule
of a sequence of zero or more States; and
a Reaction, etc. Elements such as Action and
of the grammar. The syntactic rules are
that describe relations among syntactic ele-

INITIATE (Event, Reaction)

accompanies the last rule above, and indicates that the Event is a cause of the
Reaction.
This approach, which can be seen as a systemization of Propp’s (1968)
proposal for a morphology of folk tales, has been followed by a’number of
researchers (for instance, Mandler and Johnson (1977), Thorndyke (1977)). It
made a substantial contribution to the field of story understanding by point-
ing out that not all coherent texts are stories, and thus demonstrated the need
for some theory to account for the notion of ‘storyness’ of texts. This focussed
attention on the generalized structural knowledge that is required to organize
and understand stories and, more generally, narrative.

2.2. Conceptual dependency

Because of their concern with structure rather than content, story grammars
have been criticized as having very little to offer to machine understanding of
texts (and even more generally as an inadequate theory of stories for any
purpose; see Black and Wilensky (1979)). It has become more and more
evident that any approach to story understanding by machine must involve
creating an internal representation of the ‘meaning’ of a story, to which access
can later be had, often in order to generate paraphrases, answer questions, or
provide a story synopsis. Early work was concerned mainly with the represen-
tation of the meaning of isolated sentences, and we will outline below one
scheme for representing sentence meaning, namely, the Conceptual Depend-
ency (CD) theory developed at Yale University by Schank (1972), since much
of the important work in story understanding has been done by former and
current members of the Yale group and has been based on this theory.
However, in order to understand a text, it is not enough to understand
individual sentences. Much information is left out of the text since it can be
inferred by the reader. We will thus discuss in the subsequent parts of this
40 N.M. Ide, f. Vtkmis / AI and literary narrame

section the problem of discovering implicit connections between the sentences

of a text, and outline the early approaches to text understanding proposed
within the CD scheme.

2.2.1. Conceptual Dependency structures for sentence understanding

One of the primary goals of CD theory was to develop a system of representa-
tion for meaning that is language independent, such that paraphrases of the
same sentence in one language, or sentences in different languages with
identical meanings, are represented in the same way. The meaning of individ-
ual sentences is represented by CD structures (see especially Schank (1975))
which consist of concepts and the relationships between these concepts. CD
structures are essentially action-centered case frames which include a set of
obligatory roles (conceptual cases). The roles may be filled by entities specified
in the sentence, by other CD structures, or by default information based on
the processor’s assumptions about what is normal in the world. For this reason
action components in CD structures are not, as in other more syntactically-
based case systems such as Fillmore’s (1968) individual verbs of a language,
but are in fact reduced to a set of a very few ‘primitive acts’, which. in theory,
can alone or in combination express the meaning of all natural language verbs.
The CD scheme breaks natural language verbs down into basic conceptual
components in the interests of language independence; a single verb may
suffice in one language where several are required to express the same action
or state in another. In CD structures, a frame for one verbal primitive can in
fact fill a role in the frame for another, and in this way complex meanings are
built up by combining the representations of more primitive CD structures.
For example, the sentence, ‘John shot Mary’ is represented by a structure
corresponding to the diagram in figure 1.
A second goal in CD theory is that all information implicit in a sentence
should be made explicit in the CD structure associated with this sentence. By
breaking meaning down into conceptual components and filling roles by
default values, CD structures represent as much of the implicit information as
possible for each sentence - in the example, we see that John was the agent of
the primitive act PROPEL, the object of which is a bullet, and the direction of
the PROPEL act was from a gun to Mary. The instrument of the act was John’s
propeling a trigger from ‘out’ to ‘in’ (we are also given the information that a
trigger is PART of a gun). The result of the action is that the state of Mary’s
health has changed from ‘X’, to something less than ‘X’. CD was first
implemented in the MARGIE system (Schank (1975)), which was designed
originally for machine translation and paraphrase.
Reiger (1975) developed inferencing routines that use the information
represented in CD structures, which enabled his system to generate a number
of assertions based on the input. Some of the assertions are drawn directly
from information represented explicitly in the CD structures; some are in-
N. M. Ide, J. V&onis / A I and literary narrative 41
42 N.M. Ide, J. V&mrs / AI and lilermy narrative

ferred by combining information given in the CD structures with additional

world knowledge available to the system. For example, the routines could
assert that ‘John pulled the trigger of a gun’ and that ‘Mary is less healthy
than before John shot her’, based on the information contained in the CD
structure representing ‘John shot Mary’ given above. They might also infer
that ‘John was probably angry at Mary’, which requires knowledge that is not
explicit in the CD representation.

2.2.2. Causal chains

Information about component actions and states made explicit in CD struc-
tures is used not only to understand individual sentences, but it is often
needed to understand connections between sentences as well (consider: ‘I
bought a book. Now I have no money’). However, understanding text de-
mands access to causal connections among narrative events which may not be
deducible from CD representations of individual sentences in a text. In fact,
textual coherence is largely dependent on causal connectivity. Many such
events and connections are not given explicitly in narrative, and some causal
relations, at the literal level, are stated erroneously or at least elliptically. For
example, consider the following text, based on a similar example in Schank
and Abelson (1977: 25-27):

Mary knocked over a pile of bricks. John’s leg was broken.

To understand this short narrative, the understanding system must have access
to a causal syntax (containing, for example, rules such as ‘actions can result in
state changes’) and a store of more specific causal knowledge (for example, a
certain action results in a certain state change or set of state changes, under
certain conditions). This will enable it to infer that Mary’s knocking over the
bricks must have caused the bricks to be propelled in such a way as to hit
John’s leg, an event which is not stated and which, though omitted from the
literal statement of the sentence, was the proximate cause of John’s injury. In
Schank’s (1977) system, the causal syntax and causal knowledge are expressed
in terms of CD primitive acts and relations. Using these tools, the system
infers a complete causal chain for a narrative, making explicit the events and
causal sequences that are implicit in the literal text.

2.2.3. Scripts
Because we utilize much idiosyncratic information about stereotypic situations
to understand texts, the notion of a script ’ was developed (Schank and
Abelson (1977)) and first implemented in the Script Applier Mechanism

’ Minsky’s (1981) notion of frames is very similar to that of a script, and has been used in a
similar way in other language understanding systems (see, for instance, Charniak (1978)).
 N.M. Ide, J. V&mis / AI and literary narrative 43

(SAM) (Cullingford (1978)). A script contains the causal chain of events for a
specific situation; thus, when the situation is encountered in a narrative, the
script is activated and the pre-arranged event sequence is provided to the
processor. For example, we understand the event sequence associated with a
stereotypic event such as a birthday party: one goes to the party and brings a
gift which has been wrapped, eats cake, sings ‘Happy Birthday’, etc. The
availability of this information in a ‘pre-packaged’ form eliminates the need
for what may be the impossible task of inferring a complex chain of events for
specialized situations. Because humans are expected to have knowledge of the
events that will take place in specialized situations such as restaurants and
birthday parties, access to this knowledge is often assumed in narrative. We
have no difficulty understanding the referent for ‘the cake’ or even the reason
why I should be eating a cake in ‘I went to Anne’s birthday party. The cake
was delicious’ because of our knowledge of birthday parties.

2.3. Plans and goals in story understanding

The drawback of a script-based approach to understanding is that deviations

from the event sequence predicted by the script cannot be handled. Most
situations, especially in stories, do not follow pre-defined sequences or contain
other non-stereotypic situations; for this reason they cannot be accounted for
by scripts. Therefore, a text understander must be able to account for actions
that are not explainable by script-based mechanisms. This demands access to a
more general kind of knowledge about human behavior. In the next major
phase of work in story understanding, it became apparent that an understand-
ing of the plans and goals of characters in narrative is essential to understand-
ing, in order to fill in implied knowledge as well as establish connections
between actions in a narrative. That is, we understand the actions of others
because of (a) our knowledge or assumption of their goal or goals, and (b) our
knowledge of what constitutes a reasonable plan to accomplish these goals.
The most influential work in the area of plans and goals in text understanding
is that of Schank and Abelson (1977) and Wilensky (1978, 1983); their work
derives from more generally applicable work on planning within the field of
AI, but unlike the latter is intended to model human cognitive processes.
The classic example to demonstrate the use of plans and goals in text
understanding is from Schank:

Willa was hungry. She picked up the Michelin guide.

On the basis of the first sentence of this ‘text’, we assume that Willa has a goal
of satisfying her hunger. The means by which we understand the second
sentence is more complex, since even though Willa’s goal is known, it is not
44 N.M. Ide, J. Ve%mis / AI and literary narrative

readily apparent why she picks up the Michelin guide. Wilensky (1983: 47)
explains the process by which the second sentence is understood:

‘The knowledge base contains the fact that picking up something is a plan for possessing that
thing. So the reader hypothesizes that Willa must have had the goal of possessing the Michelin
guide. This goal must then be explained. Again, there is no ready explanation for this in the
story text. However, the knowledge base contains the fact that having possession of something
that has a function is instrumental to performing that function. Thus the reader infers that
Willa is going to read the guide. Reading is often a plan for finding out some information, and
since the Michelin guide is a source of information about restaurants, the reader infers that
Willa must have had the goal of knowing the location of a restaurant. Having this goal can be
explained by the fact that knowing the location of a place is often instrumental to going there.
Being at a restaurant is in turn instrumental to eating at the restaurant. Eating at a restaurant
is a plan to satisfy hunger, which was previously predicted to be one of Willa’s goals. An
explanation for Willa’s action has been found, and the inference process ceases.’

This example demonstrates the kind of inferencing about plans that is often
required to understand a text, and provides a sense of the kinds of knowledge
about planning and goals that the processor must have available to it in order
to make such inferences. In general, when encountering the actions of a
character in a story, the processor will, if the goal is given, try to determine
which plan among those known to satisfy that goal is being executed, by
matching subsequent actions with actions known to constitute such a plan. If
the goal is not given, the processor will attempt to infer the goal (as well as the
state of the world that having that goal implies) from the actions given, again
by determining the plan the actions serve to implement. Thus the processor
must have knowledge of the plans that can be used to satisfy goals and the
goals that may be satisfied by specific plans. Plans must be specified in the
knowledge base in a sufficiently general way to provide for broad applicability
across situations. Note that when the goals and plans of a character are
understood along the lines of the example given above, an enormous amount
of implied information is generated which connects sentences and can be used
to understand later sentences. The primary requirement for text understanding
is still considered to be the recovery of implied information.
Actions are explained by plans, plans are explained by go&, and goals are
explained by themes. Themes are given in the knowledge base as normal
irreducible goals for which no further explanation is needed and which can be
postulated for any agent, unless explicitly contradicted, such as ‘being accepted
by the opposite sex’ or ‘honesty’. Themes can be viewed as the background
knowledge required to predict that individuals will have certain goals. Identify-
ing appropriate themes is yet another task of story understanding; therefore,
the text understander must also have a thorough knowledge of which goals are
motivated by particular themes, Because themes themselves are taken as
 N.M. Ide, .I. VPronis / AI and literary narrative 45

requiring no further explanation, theme identification is the last step in finding

the implicit connections between textual events. 2

2.4. Thematic knowledge

Wilensky (1982) points out that goal interactions are essential to capture the
notion of ‘storyness’, since not all coherent sets of sentences are stories. He
identifies a story as a set of sentences that ‘has a point to it’, that is, ‘some
element that invokes the interest of the reader’. Most of these points are in
turn expressed as goal relationships such as goal conflict, goal subsumption, or
goal competition. The concern with goal interactions in AI models of text
understanding is, for the literary scholar, an interesting step in story under-
standing: situations such as goal conflict are the building blocks of plot and
literary theme, and so for the first time we see concern for the kinds of
information about a text that would be of interest in literary analysis.
To understand a story it is necessary to do more than to discover a single
plan of a single character: it is necessary to be able to track the potentially
multiple plans of multiple characters and to handle such things as the revision
of plans and the abandonment of goals. PAM, the Plan Applier Mechanism
developed by Wilensky (1978) accomplishes these aspects of plan manage-
ment. Beyond such tracking, it is necessary to engage in what Wilensky (1983)
calls ‘meta-planning’ in order to understand interactions between goals. The
processor must first be capable of recognizing and dealing with the interac-
tions between a character’s plans and goals and between the plans and goals of
different characters. That is, situations such as goal conflict, goal overlap, and
goal concord must be recognized; and meta-planning procedures must be
invoked to attempt to explain what is and what may be done by the characters
involved in these situations. For instance, if it is established that a goal
conflict exists between two of a character’s goals, then the meta-planner must,
on the basis of the meta-theme ‘achieve as many goals as possible’, assume
that the character has the meta-goal to ‘resolve goal conflict; subsequent
actions can then be explained by fitting them into a meta-plan (for example,
‘try alternate plan’) that would satisfy the meta-goal.
Wilensky’s notion of meta-planning and the recognition of goal interaction
as an important facet of narrative understanding represent the concerns of the
next important step in story understanding by machine: the use of thematic
knowledge. Thematic knowledge, in the AI sense of the term, derives from
recognition of patterns in goals and events, such as the recognition of goal

’ To stop the process of explanation at the level of theme, as it is defined by Schank and Abelson
(1977) and Wilensky (1982). has intuitive appeal, since humans seem, in routine communication,
to accept such tenets without additional motivation. To stop at this point in any case prevents an
infinite regress of explanation.
46 N.M. Ide, J. Vhnis / AI and litermy narratrue

conflict noted above, and results in abstract characterizations of situations and

events that several researchers (Dyer (1981, 1983) Lehnert (1981) Schank
(1982) Wilensky (1982, 1983)) h ave recently argued are essential for under-
standing. In particular, thematic knowledge enables making inferences that are
based on the generalized characteristics of a situation and not on the particu-
lars of the situation immediately at hand. There are, for instance, many
inferences that can be made concerning potential plans and reactions of
characters when goal conflict is recognized, regardless of the particular goals
that are in conflict. Such inferences can organize narrative events, once the
events have been processed, more abstractly and generally than can goal and
event graphs alone. In addition, they can create expectations for what is to
come in the narrative. Further, access to broad knowledge about thematic
structures can, as Schank’s (1982) recent work suggests, enable recognition of
similar or parallel experiences or situations, between texts or even within the
same text.
Lehnert (1981) proposed representing stories as affect state graphs com-
posed of mental states, negative events, and positive events that are causally
linked by actualization, termination, equivalence, and motivation. Patterns in
the graphs, corresponding to pre-defined thematic components such as ‘com-
petition’ or ‘retaliation’, constitute what Lehnert calls ‘plot units.’ A story is
represented by a series of overlapping plot units, which provide a mapping of
thematic structure. Schank (1982) and Dyer (1981, 1983) have been concerned
with even more abstract thematic structures, which derive from similar but
more complex configurations than those contained in plot units. BORIS (Lehnert
et al. (1983)) in particular, deals with situations involving plan failure and
uses adages such as ‘don’t count your chickens before they are hatched’ to
characterize these situations. Both Schank and Dyer deal with thematic
knowledge that may serve to state the overall point of a simple story.

3. Suggestions for a computational model of literary understanding

It should be noted that while several story understanding systems based on the
theories outlined above have been implemented, these systems are severely
restricted in the actual texts they can handle. For instance, BORIS, which is one
of the most sophisticated understanding programs yet developed, can handle
only a few very simple stories within a highly specialized domain of topics. It
is clear, then, that nothing like an understanding program capable of handling
literary texts is conceivable in the near future.
We can, however, consider modifications that would be required in current
AI models in order to handle meaning in literary narrative. Certain of these
modifications are quantitative and consist of extending the information and
processing strategies already implemented in story understanding systems. For
 N.M. Ide, J. V&ok / AI and literary narrative 41

instance, the general knowledge about the world represented in current AI

story understanding systems is drastically impoverished, even if one intends to
model the most naive of readers. The same is true of the inferencing proce-
dures which utilize this knowledge. Literary texts involve significantly more
complex universes than anything treated in current AI work, and any under-
standing system intended to model literary understanding will need to incor-
porate much more world knowledge and possess far greater inferencing
abilities than any existing system 3. However, many and probably the most
important sources of meaning in literary narrative cannot be handled through
simple extension but require instead a qualitative revision of the current
models. We outline below several areas which will require modifications to the
current AI approach to narrative understanding in order to treat literary
narrative: the representation of sentence meaning (sec. 3.1) the understanding
of a text’s goal and purpose (sec. 3.2) the derivation of meaning from
non-narrative textual features (sec. 3.3), and the need for more explicit and
flexible models of the reader’s own activity, goals, and abilities (sec. 3.4).

3.1. Meaning representation

In order to deal with literary narrative, the AI approach to the representation

of meaning will require fundamental changes. CD and similar theories attempt
to provide a representation which will be the same for sentences that ‘mean’
the same thing - that is, for sentences which, if they are in the same language,
are paraphrases of one another. For instance, the CD structure representing
the meaning of ‘Peter ate a steak’ and ‘Peter ate a piece of dead beef’ will be
the same. However, in a literary text (and possibly in any text), differences in
phrasing in sentences which may convey the same content are significant. In
the example just cited, for instance, there is a difference in meaning between
the two sentences which, even out of context, is apparent. The difference
indicates something about Peter, possibly, or the narrator; it certainly provides
a different perspective for the reader on what Peter is eating. This dictates that
a system cannot deal with an abstract representation of meaning alone, that it
must deal explicitly at some point with the actual words in the text (and not a
set of primitives to which the words may have been reduced), in order to
determine, especially, their semantic characteristics and their relations to other
textual elements. It also dictates that some means must be found to capture
the differences in meaning between the sentences in their representations.
Similarly, representation schemes will need to be enhanced to deal at a
different level with phenomena such as ambiguity. Current AI schemes tend to

3 The problems of representing and accessing vast amounts of knowledge are the focus of a
substantial body of research within AI, and the prospects for being able to represent anything like
the knowledge a human possesses are not near at hand.
48 N. M. Ide, J. V&onis / A I and literary narrative

seek a single ‘best’ meaning for any sentence and try to solve ambiguities by
any available means - for instance, on the basis of probability. If left
unresolved, ambiguity presents substantial problems for most AI understand-
ing systems, and may even halt the understanding process. However, in human
communication it is not always necessary to resolve ambiguities; in literary
texts, ambiguity is often intentional and contributes significantly to the text’s
meaning. Thus for literary understanding ambiguity must be not only
acknowledged but also retained in the representation of meaning. Ambiguous
inferences must be retained as well. Ultimately all possible interpretations
must be linked up, where appropriate, to other structures that have been built
so far in the course of processing. 4 This will in turn require a means to mark
the ambiguous elements, in case one or the other is discarded on the basis of
later information. The nature of the ambiguity - for instance, whether or not
alternate meanings are incompatible - must also be determined.
Changes will also be required in the amount and kind of information that is
included in a representation of meaning, in particular for sentences and
smaller narrative units. Meaning representation schemes such as CD structures
will often represent, indiscriminately, too much of the meaning of a sentence,
given its context. For example, the details of John’s pulling the trigger are
likely not part of what a reader will conceptualize in most situations when he
sees the sentence ‘John shot Mary’, although this information is part of the
CD representation of the sentence’s meaning. This information may be rele-
vant in certain situations - for example, if a subsequent part of the narrative
describes the trembling of John’s finger pulling the trigger - in which case a
link must be established between this new information, when it is encountered,
and the information related to the pulling of the trigger in the representation
of ‘John shot Mary’. However, in most other cases the information concerning
the trigger will be irrelevant. In understanding systems that utilize CD and
similar representations of sentence meaning there is no means to differentiate
between relevant and irrelevant information in the representation, based on
context. Such differentiation is essential for representing meaning in literary
texts, because of the tendency in literature to use details extensively in order to
enforce certain perspectives on characters and events. Of course, it is impossi-
ble to predict before the entire text is processed which details in a representa-
tion may be relevant, and therefore it is necessary during processing to retain
the full range of potentially relevant information available while clearly
distinguishing those features of meaning that have been shown to be relevant
so far.
On the other hand, CD and similar representation schemes often do not
include information implicit in the meaning of a sentence that may be

4 When and how an ambiguity is resolved may be important for meaning as well; see section 3.3.1.
 N.M. Ide, J. Vthnis / AI and literary narrative 49

important to a full understanding of that sentence and ultimately the text in

which it appears. For instance, many aspects of meaning for the sentence
‘John shot Mary’ (for example, John aiming at Mary, the weight of the gun,
the type of the bullet, etc.), any of which might be highly relevant in certain
contexts, are omitted in its CD representation. As mentioned above, an
enormous range and variety of details may be exploited in literary narrative to
shape the reader’s perception of and perspective on characters and events; the
extensive reliance on such implicit information (rather than on information
that is given explicitly) to make meaning in a text is a fundamental feature in
the distinction between literary and non-literary texts. Thus for literary
understanding the representation of sentence meaning (or for that matter the
meaning of larger pieces of narrative) must potentially include a much wider
range of information than current representation schemes can conveniently
handle. In addition, it is essential to provide indications of the degree and
nature of the relevance of that information for the meaning of the item
represented. This involves more than simply expanding the knowledge base
and inferencing abilities of the system, and will require an approach to
meaning representation that is substantially different from that of CD.
It seems therefore that the very axioms of CD and similar theories - that is,
the assumptions that (1) sentences having the ‘same’ meaning should have the
same representation; (2) the representation should be unambiguous; (3) all the
information implicit in a sentence should be made explicit in the representa-
tion - must be abandoned. First, different sentences must have different
representations, and only the reader’s inference process may make them
synonymous in given situations. Synonymy can thus be seen as the extraction
of the same set of inferences in a given context from distinct representations.
Second, ambiguous sentences must have ambiguous representations. It is the
reader’s inference processes that will either solve the ambiguity or use the
ambiguous representation as a basic fact in further reasoning. Third, fixed
structures that attempt to contain all implicit information must be replaced by
flexible structures that include or clearly identify the relevant information for
the context. A structure representing sentence meaning (or the representation
of knowledge at any level) should be a minimum schema which includes only
the information that can be connected to existing foregrounded information
(see section 3.3.1), and which can be used when needed as a basis for
inferences appropriate in a particular context. It is at the same time clear that
more knowledge relevant to the meaning of sentences, and more kinds of
knowledge, must be available to an understanding system for use, when
needed, in the appropriate contexts, in order to accommodate the wide range
of detail that may be exploited in literary narrative to create meaning and
effect.
50 N.M. Ide, J. Vhnis / AI and literary narrative

3.2. Recognition of purpose and theme

It should be obvious from the discussion in section 2 that, according to current

AI strategies, understanding a story largely involves recognizing and repre-
senting events and the relations among them, as well as recognizing intentions
(that is, the goals which certain events may serve to fulfil) and characterizing
certain relations between goals. Thus the concept of understanding current in
AI resembles that employed in high-school-level reading comprehension
examinations, which test the ability to retrieve information given explicitly (for
the most part) in a narrative and to understand the relationships among
events. For some types of texts, this approach may capture the notion of
‘understanding; but it does not adequately describe, nor can it account for,
what we mean when we speak of ‘understanding’ a literary narrative. We
would not say that someone who has merely recognized events, goals, and
relations among them has properly understood a literary narrative. Even the
reader of a book-jacket blurb has to do more than this. Some recognition of
the work’s thematic statements and, perhaps most important, the text’s pur-
pose is also required for understanding, and especially for literary understand-
ing.
Literary texts are unique in that their purposes are almost never entirely
explicit; it remains the task of the reader to discover the full purpose of the
text. Further, the act of reading a literary work involves discovering the overall
thematic statements that the text is making. Literary themes are often con-
veyed through means other than through the events in the narrative itself (see
section 3.3). For example, in a narrative which involves the theme of man’s
struggle against nature, the sinister aspects of nature may not be conveyed
through events in a recognizable way, but rather through imagery or associa-
tions established through parallelism or indirect analogy. Current AI systems
consider only event sequences in determining themes. This restricts them not
only in the sources of thematic statement but also in the range and complexity
of themes that can be identified. Thematic statements in a literary narrative
are considerably more complex than the themes described in AI. Although AI
themes such as ‘goal conflict’ or even ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ may
constitute the rudiments or elements of the kinds of themes conventionally
identified in the course of literary analysis, they still lack the complexity and
generality of what are typically regarded as literary themes. And while the
notion of characterizing story content with adages moves in the direction of
considering the purpose behind a text, AI work in story understanding has not
yet directly addressed this concern.
A reader’s understanding of a text will be driven by both an a priori
understanding of the purpose of a literary text ~ the general notions of
purpose with which he approaches the text - and his goal of determining
purpose and theme. In fact, the reader will strive to find interrelations that can
 N.M. Ide, J. Vhnis / AI and literary narrative 51

ultimately yield thematic statement, consciously or unconsciously, and with a

greater or lesser degree of sophistication depending on the individual. For
instance, since all plots involve conflict, the reader will come to the text
‘expecting’ conflict, and he will attempt to fit information that he encounters
into this general idea of what the text is about. As he encounters more
information, he will refine his ideas of the nature of the conflict (for example,
he may find that it involves man against nature, man against other men, or
man against himself); these more specific constructs will guide in an even
more restricted way the processing of information that appears still later in the
text. (Of course, in a complex narrative, several themes may exist simulta-
neously and be interrelated, and the reader must track these interrelated
themes.) More generally, as the reader meets new information in reading a
text, he will first look for interrelations among elements and favor interpreta-
tions of and inferences about that information that support establishing such
interrelations, and which fit into his overall concept of what the thematic
statements of the text will be. Later, the reader will favor interpretations and
inferences that fit in with what has been constructed so far, or, at the least, he
will seek to integrate the information into his model of thematic statement and
purpose.
Within AI models the acquisition of thematic knowledge and an under-
standing of a text’s purpose are not seen explicitly as the reader’s goals, and
certainly not as overriding goals in the way we have described them above. Yet
it is clearly essential for a model of literary understanding, and possibly for
any model of narrative understanding, to take into account the influence of
these goals in driving the understanding process. More importantly, it is
essential to treat these goals specifically as those of the reader, and to model
the interaction and hierarchy among these and other of the reader’s goals in
much the same way as current systems do for the goals of characters in a story.
This topic is discussed in more detail in section 3.4.2.

3.3. Meaning gleaned from ‘non-events’

Meaning - that is, for our purposes that which the text conveys to the reader -
in a literary work is derived from many sources other than narrative events
and intentions. Meaning in literary works is typically multiple and occasion-
ally ambiguous. Event sequences and the goals and plans they imply are in
some cases only secondary contributors to the overall effect of a literary work;
literature is characterized by conveying its meaning through means other than
explicit statement. It is in fact literature’s tendency to take a reader through an
experience, to show rather than to tell, that differentiates it from other kinds
of narrative; it is precisely when narrative that is typically non-literary (e.g.,
journalism, history) moves from telling to showing that it is most apt to be felt
‘literary’ - and vice versa. Making a slightly weaker claim, we could alterna-
52 N.M. Ide, J. V&onis / AI and literary narrative

tively say that literature is not wholly reducible to its explicit paraphrasable
content. Either claim suffices to motivate a discussion of the ways in which the
non-paraphrasable content of a text is to be understood and made explicit.

3.3.1. Foregrounding and textual interrelations

Apart from meaning that is conveyed through the events of the narrative itself,
literature conveys meaning by two major processes: foregrounding and the
interrelating of elements of the text. It is in accommodating these processes
that AI models require most modification in order to handle literary narrative.
A literary text creates experience by carefully orchestrating the reader’s
perception of characters, events, and setting. Devices such as imagery, diction,
rhetorical figures, point of view, formal patterns and their distortion (including
meter and linguistic features like social register, sentence complexity, or
similar linguistically marked stylistic patterns), and patterns of scene-construc-
tion or story-construction are the tools used to accomplish this orchestration.
The devices also serve to foreground the textual elements to which they are
applied; foregrounding is a key mechanism, and possibly the single mecha-
nism, by which these extremely various tools produce their effect on the
processing of the text and thus on the reader. Foregrounding is also an
important mechanism in understanding event sequences. Information that
violates expectations will establish or accentuate a relationship between what
was expected and what was actually provided, and both this relationship and
the information that violates expectations are foregrounded. Similarly, infor-
mation that is expected (for instance, based on the plan that the reader
assumes a character will implement) but remains unspecified is foregrounded.
Foregrounding guides the understanding process because it enables the
reader to select, among information coming in as he or she processes the text,
the important or relevant aspects of that information required for understand-
ing the text at hand. When an item or items are foregrounded, they will guide
the readerS interpretation of subsequent information. That is, the way in which
any element of a text is processed depends in large part upon the context in
which it appears; and foregrounding is the primary means by which this
context is established. For an AI implementation, foregrounding affects
processing in two significant ways: at the sentence level, foregrounded infor-
mation could be used not only for disambiguation, but also to determine
which of the information potentially available in a representation of the
meaning of a sentence is important or even relevant, as outlined in section 3.1
above. The selection process, of course, will work at higher levels than that of
the sentence, and will work in particular for newly foregrounded items: the
reader will strive to find connections between newly foregrounded items and
already existing ones. It is on this habit that the authors of literary narrative
depend to achieve their effects.
The influence of foregrounding on selection extends to inferencing as well.
 N.M. Ide, J. V&oh / AI and literary narrative 53

Thus when the reader encounters the fact that Willa intends to go to a
restaurant, as in Schank’s example above, a great number of inferences are
possible; but if earlier in the text it has been established that Willa is
struggling against her own reclusive tendencies (information, we assume, that
would have been foregrounded earlier in the text), the number of possible
inferences is narrowed considerably. On the other hand, if the reader knows
that Willa is very poor, then different inferences may be made. In addition,
foregrounding helps to determine which inferences are reasonable, in much the
same ways as it helps determine the relevant information about a sentence. In
fact, foregrounding will make certain inferences possible in the first place. For
instance, when encountering the fact that Willa picked up the Michelin Guide,
the inference engine would not routinely start thinking about what this may
imply about Willa’s extravagant life style, unless, perhaps, wealth or money
had been foregrounded earlier.
To take the effects of foregrounding into account in processing literary
narrative, substantial data management will be required to keep track of
foregrounded items. Probably, the potential impact of a foregrounded item is
very strong just after it is encountered; after that, unless it is reinforced by
linkage to a newly encountered item, its strength may ‘decay’ gradually as the
reader moves farther and farther away from it. Of course, if an item is indeed
linked to a new item, then a third entity results, which will exert a still stronger
influence on the processing of subsequent information, both because it has
been encountered more recently than the original foregrounded item and
because its strength has been augmented by having been reinforced. The
conception of this process as one involving activation, decay, and reactivation
of foregrounded items suggests a connectionist model; however, it is clear that
consideration of the behavior and interactions of foregrounded items is an
area which demands much more study in order to propose any scheme for
modelling them.
Literary narrative also depends heavily on establishing relations among
textual elements - relations such as opposition, causality, or straightforward
association - to convey meaning. The establishing of relations among elements
is very intimately connected with the notion of foregrounding, since fore-
grounded elements often serve as the elements involved in such relations. The
relation between foregrounding and linkage of textual elements is complex,
and full understanding and cataloguing of their interactions will require
substantial study. Speaking very generally, we can observe that the relation-
ships that are established among foregrounded elements within a text are knit
together in a complex network which will typically transcend the inherent
linearity of narrative. It is in this network that much of the meaning of a
literary narrative will reside, and from which its structure and its thematic
statements can be gleaned. The structure that reflects the networking of ideas
after a text is processed should reflect the structure of ideas in that text. It
 54 N.M. Ide, J. V&onis / AI and literary narratwe

should be clear within this network what the major ideas are, how ideas relate
to one another within the text, at what points in the text significant ‘fusions’ -
possibly involving the sudden connection of several items, or two or more
important items - occur, where significant parallels or contrasts are estab-
lished and resolved, etc. This structure in turn will affect the meaning of the
text for the reader: for example, if a significant fusion of several ideas occurs
at a particular place in a text, the reader will recognize this point in the text as
significant. Other information that appears there will be foregrounded. The
remainder of the text will, possibly, be processed differently, if the reader
senses that the climactic moment has been reached and assumes the remainder
of the text constitutes the denouement.
This outline of the role of foregrounding and interlinkage of textual
elements is extremely sketchy, and leaves out a consideration of many im-
portant elements, such as the varying effects of different kinds of fore-
grounded information and links. It is intended to suggest avenues for further
consideration, and not to be a definitive outline of what would be required in
an implemented narrative understanding program. However, the role of fore-
grounding and the development of the network of relationships seems to be a
most promising and important area for further investigation, because of the
significance of these processes in literary understanding.

3.3.2. Meaning derived from processing

AI models of understanding aim toward the construction of some structure
which is the result, or product, of processing for a particular text. This
structure is assumed to capture the text’s meaning, and therefore to provide
the information required to answer questions about the processed story.
However, an important part of the meaning of literary narrative results from
the successive steps taken by the reader as he builds his notion of meaning
during the processing of the text. 5 These different steps contain information
that is often temporary, incomplete, and possibly erroneous; in current AI
models such information is not included in the final structure representing the
text’s meaning. However, information of this kind is often an integral part of
the meaning of a narrative,
The most obvious example of the importance of the steps of processing is
the common situation in which the reader is intentionally misled into making
false associations or inferences that are later shattered by new information.

s Wellek and Warren (1970) define story as process: ‘To tell a story, one has to be concerned
about the happening, not merely the outcome [the reader] who reads only the ‘concluding
chapter’ of a nineteenth century novel would be somebody incapable of interest in a story, which
is process - even though process towards an end’ (our emphasis). This concern with the processes
of comprehension is also consistent with Wolfgang Iser’s reader-oriented theories of narrative
understanding. Galloway (1983) makes this point and suggests that AI might consider an analysis
of processing itself to get at meaning, but does not develop this idea further.
 N.M. Ide, J. Vhnis / AI and literary narrative 55

The meaning of the text for the reader - the reader’s experience of the text -
can be defined very largely by the ways in which these false assumptions are
created, and how and when they are shattered. To understand a murder
mystery, for instance, it is not enough to recite the sequence of events by
which the crime was committed and solved; one must also grasp the means by
which the knowledge of the perpetrator is kept from the reader and how it is
slowly or obliquely revealed to him. Similarly, in a text which presents a
certain view of a character and later reveals that this view is flawed, one of the
major points or themes of the text may be that partial or incorrect information
can lead to false assumptions about a person. Many narration mechanisms
also achieve their purpose through their effect on processing - for instance,
limited-point-of-view narration (which may encourage certain inferences and
associations and inhibit others, based on the limits of the point of view), and
out-of-sequence narration and multi-stranded narrative (which may limit the
reader’s knowledge and purposefully add to it in order to affect the drawing of
inferences).
All of this suggests that the processing of narrative itself must be taken into
account to yield that text’s ‘final’ meaning. Thus the steps mvolved in
processing should be retained for examination after processing is completed.
Retaining a trace of the procedures used would enable access to information
which could contribute, at the least, to a still better understanding of the ways
in which meaning is created (if not to the meaning itself) - for example, it
would be revealing to determine which information in a text required calling
the same sequences of procedures, or required accessing the same knowledge
structures. In addition to (or as an alternative to) examining a trace of
processing after it has been completed, information about processing could be
gathered and considered during the processing itself. Certainly, it is necessary
to consider the effects of, say, learning information through flashback at the
time the flashback is encountered; this will modify both the way the informa-
tion itself is perceived and the way subsequent information is processed. It
may be that certain phenomena of processing must be considered as they are
encountered, while others must wait to be considered after processing is
complete. In any event, it is clear that the dynamic evolution of the meaning
during the processing of text is itself an important contributor to the overall
meaning, and one which AI models have not yet included.

3.4. Modeling the reader

Building story understanding programs can be seen as an attempt to model the

reader. Even if this claim has not always been made explicitly by AI re-
searchers involved in this field, it is clear that story understanding programs
fundamentally behave as readers, although very naive ones in the state of the
art. The role of the ‘reader’ in AI understanding programs is mainly to find
56 N.M. Ide, J. Vhms / AI and liiermy narrative

coherence in the sequence of events by identifying themes and recognizing the

relationships between goals and plans of the characters. The role of the reader
in a model of literary understanding must extend well beyond this (weakly)
implicit reader in current AI models.

3.4. I. Implementing the reader’s literary abilities

An understanding system for literary narrative must be capable of recognizing
and understanding the effect on meaning of textual elements other than
sequences of events and the relations among them. It must be able to detect
and consider the effects of such things as meter, syntax, and other linguistic
features of text, as well as a full range of semantic relations among words and
concepts; it must be able to process and analyze the text in a particular
domain (e.g., meter and metrical effects), to recognize when and how some-
thing is foregrounded within that domain, and to identify and establish links
among textual elements on the basis of parallelism, contrast, and so on. A part
of this capability requires access to specific kinds of knowledge - for example,
knowledge about narrative structures or semantic knowledge. 6 However,
much of this capability rests in specific abilities - such as the ability to
recognize and appreciate the effects of syntactic or other stylistic and struct-
ural variations. These abilities are properties of the reader and may vary from
reader to reader; for a model of literary understanding, they must be recog-
nized and implemented as such.
The difference between know/edge and ability for literary understanding is
important. We do, after all, teach students at the college level how to ‘read’
and understand literature, whereas the kinds of abilities required to under-
stand narrative in the ways current AI models attempt to understand them
seem to be regarded as more nearly innate for an average language user and as
depending more (in terms of where in the model variations in capability could
be introduced) on experience and knowledge than specific skills. There are,
furthermore, vaster differences in ability among readers to understand litera-
ture. Consequently, in addition to providing an understanding system with the
special abilities required for literary understanding, some thought must be
given to the level of such understanding that is desired or desirable. ’ In any
case, it is extremely difficult to formalize abilities by means of explicit
knowledge and explicit rules; the modelling and implementation of special
abilities is a challenging problem in the current state of Al.

6 See Ide (1988) for a discussion of some of the special kinds of semantic knowledge needed for
literary understanding.
’ This also suggests that one could modify the understanding program in order to determine the
effects of enhancing or reducing ability, or, for that matter, the effects of modifying the knowledge
that a reader has.
 N.M. Ide, J. Vhnis / AI and literary narratrve 51

3.4.2. The reader’s goals and plans

The reader’s goals, and the strategies for reaching these goals, are different for
literary texts than for other texts. For a literary text these goals and strategies
are likely to be considerably more complex than for, say, a newspaper story,
where the goal may be only to ‘get information’ - a goal implicit in current AI
strategies for story understanding, which include procedures to construct static
structures representing a sequence of events. The reader of a literary text, on
the other hand, would almost never have the gaining of information as his or
her sole goal. In fact, the reader of literature very likely has multiple goals: to
be entertained, to learn, to broaden experience or to find an expression for an
experience. Furthermore, the reader can develop more specific goals as the text
is processed - for instance, to construct a coherent picture of a scene,
experience the atmosphere of a scene, construct the psychology of a specific
character, find links with other narratives. These new goals will generate
expectations which will influence and drive the understanding process and will
act in the service of satisfying the overall goals with which the reader
approaches the text.
Thus a reader’s goals in approaching a work of literature are more open-
ended than for other kinds of texts and may be modified or extended during
the process of reading. The ways in which the content of the text affects the
reader’s goals is, in fact, part of the eventual meaning of the text. Due to this
complexity, the reader’s goals and general expectations as he approaches the
text, and as they are modified in the process of reading as well as his strategies
for reaching these goals must be explicitly modelled. Modelling the goals and
plans of the reader involves processes identical to those involved in modelling
the goals and plans of characters within a story; the kinds of goals that are
attributed to characters in a story and the plans and planning strategies that
are assumed to achieve these goals, are not limited to modelling the behavior
of fictional characters but instead model human behavior in general. Thus the
same procedures currently used in AI systems to model the goals and plans of
the characters of a story can be applied to model the reader himself.
A reader approaches a text with potentially several very general goals - for
instance, to be entertained, to expand experience, etc. Other more specific
goals may act in the service of these goals, such as the goal to discover the
purpose of the text, which in turn could help to satisfy the overall goals of
being entertained or of learning. Thus a hierarchy of goals will exist as the
reader approaches the text. As the text is processed, this goal hierarchy will be
extended, growing downward from the top-most node or nodes as new goals
and plans are generated and goals and plans are abandoned or modified
during reading. During processing this hierarchy will grow and shrink dynami-
cally as sub-goals are generated that will serve to satisfy goals higher up in the
hierarchy. At the end of reading, the hierarchy may be identical to that with
which the reader began (except where the goals have been modified), since
58 N.M. Ide, J. Vhnis / AI and hterarynarrative

most or all of the goals generated during processing will have been fulfilled or
abandoned before the entire text is processed.
The goals within the goal hierarchy at any given moment during processing
and the plans that are implemented to serve these goals may interact in very
complex ways - they may, for instance, complement one another (for example,
understanding the psychology of a character can lead to the discovery of the
key to solving the story’s mystery) or conflict (for example, lingering over
details in order to experience a scene vs. reading rapidly in order to fill in
one’s knowledge of the event sequence). When goals or plans conflict, it must
be clear which among the conflicting goals will be served. For instance, will
the goal to discover the overall purpose of the text or the goal of gaining
emotional experience always override the ‘lesser’, more immediate goal of
learning what a character will do next? Putting this more generally, will goals
higher up in the hierarchy be served first when a conflict arises? Are current
AI strategies for modelling the resolution of goal conflict for characters in
narrative (i.e., Wilensky’s ‘metaplanning’) adequate to model these processes
in readers as well? The answers to these questions are not clear, and it may in
fact be the case that priorities among reader’s goals vary from reader to reader,
and possibly from situation to situation. This speaks again to the need to
include a model of the reader’s goals and plans in an understanding system.
In addition to being arranged hierarchically, goals within the hierarchy may
also be organized linearly, as a sequence of goals. For instance, readers bring
to the reading of a text their general knowledge about stories and literature
(which will vary from reader to reader), which will include, for instance,
knowledge of typical story schemas similar to those embodied in story
grammars. Thus a reader will come to a text expecting an overall sequence of
‘events’ to occur, such as the setting up of a conflict, a moment when the
conflict reaches its height, and a resolution. The reader will generate goals to
fulfil these expectations. When the first goal (e.g., identify the conflict) is
achieved, the reader moves on to the second, etc., in a sequential fashion.
Obviously, each of these goals may generate several sub-goals, which for story
schema may consist of a sequence of goals to recognize the components of a
situation or scene and which may themselves be linearly arranged. The
reader’s goals to fulfil these expectations based on his knowledge of the
structure of story, episode, scene, etc., will guide the way in which new
information is processed as it is encountered, by favoring certain interpreta-
tions and emphases on the basis of its hypothetical role in the structure of the
story.
The reader in a model of understanding is himself responsible for monitor-
ing, managing, and interrelating points of view, including that of the reader.
This involves constructing a partial world view and a set of goals and plans for
characters, narrator, and possibly even an implied author. The management of
this information involves not only passing control to the appropriate entity at
 N.M. Ide, J. Vtkmis / AI and literary narrative 59

the right moment as the text is processed, but also involves a potentially
multi-tiered structure in which the narrator’s view of the characters, and then
the reader’s view of the narrator, may be included. Beyond this the reader
must track relationships among the world views, plans, and goals of characters
and (depending on the sophistication of the reader and the text itself ‘)
narrator and the implied author. Tracking relations among characters’ goals
and plans enables recognition of Wilensky’s ‘themes’; tracking relations
among the reader’s goals (especially specific goals generated as the text is
processed) and those of characters or narrator may serve to identify the
function of a character - protagonist, antagonist - in the text.
Thus, two levels of goal and plan management need to be added to current
AI models of understanding: first, a level which models the goals and plans of
the reader himself in the act of reading, and second, a level which models the
reader’s own management and coordination of plans, goals, and point of view
for himself, narrator, and characters. Much AI work on goals and plan
generation and interaction can be applied to these additional elements as well,
but other mechanisms will likely be required. In particular, means to account
for and handle interactions among the reader’s top-level goals in reading will
need to be developed, since considerations very different from those in
Wilensky’s meta-planning schemes seem to be involved in the resolution of
conflicts among goals of this kind.

3.4.3. The reader as a variable

Existing models of story comprehension seek to extract from the analysis of a
text a single ‘objective’ meaning. This approach to meaning is similar to that
of the early structuralists, who viewed meaning wholly as a function of
relationships among identifiable elements of a text and independent of cult-
ural or literary context, and in particular, independent of personal context for
a given reader. Such an approach may suffice for the very simple non-literary
texts that current AI understanding systems can handle. However, if we accept
the hypothesis that meaning in a text derives largely from the experience of the
text (from being shown rather than told), we must accept the conclusion that
whaf is actually experienced depends largely on the reader. This view of the
source of textual meaning is closer to Iser’s (1978) reader-oriented theory,
which, although open to criticism in many of its aspects, provides a point of
departure for an AI approach to literary understanding.
We do not suggest that meaning rests entirely with the reader, that there are
as many disjoint meanings for a text as there are readers. There are certainly
objective elements of meaning which exist and can be identified in a text; they

’ Compare, for example, what would be required to deal with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as
opposed to an ‘objective’ novel of Dickens, where the narrator is effectively non-existent and
narrative point of view is controlled throughout.
60 N. M. Ide, J. V&mm / A I and literary narrative

result most often from the deliberate construction of the text by the author,
and leave identifiable marks of their presence (for example, changes in point
of view, the holding back of certain pieces of information, etc.). On the other
hand, different readers are not totally independent and intellectually disjoint
entities. Any two readers, as different as they may be, will always share a large
body of cultural knowledge and personal experience. When readers share
common knowledge and abilities, they will tend to process a text in the same
way, and literary texts, especially, are consciously constructed to guide the
attentive reader in this processing. In this way common meanings can be
extracted from a text. But individual readers, who in addition to the common
core of knowledge and abilities may possess additional, possibly idiosyncratic
knowledge and abilities, will process the text accordingly. The approach to
meaning that we suggest for AI models of understanding can therefore be seen
as falling somewhere between the extremes of the purely structuralist and the
purely reader-oriented views.
In existing story understanding systems, the ‘reader’ is, effectively, the
understanding program itself. The restricted goals of this reader (to gain
information, to find a character’s plan which explains each event, to find a
character’s goal for each plan, to identify themes, etc.), as well as the
knowledge, abilities, and strategies necessary to realize these goals, are not
articulated and implemented separately but are instead enmeshed in the
procedures of the understanding program. If the goals, strategies, knowledge,
and abilities of the reader outlined in sections 3.4.1 and 3.4.2 were to be made
explicit and implemented in an easily modifiable, declarutiue form, it would be
possible to model differences among readers as well as to observe the results,
in terms perhaps of differences in meaning, for different readers of the same
text. In such a model, the program is not a ‘reader’ but it is instead an
‘interpreter’ capable of simulating the behavior of different readers. Such an
approach adds, at least conceptually, a level of processing beyond that in
current AI models.
The approach outlined above is consistent with the criticism of meaning
representation developed in section 3.1. The analysis of a text will not, as in
CD-like theories, yield a unique and exhaustive representation of meaning, but
will instead yield a minimal schema, resulting from the extraction of the
objectively identifiable textual elements that contribute to meaning, which is
then interpreted by different ‘readers’ in order to obtain their different (but
partially overlapping) meanings.

4. Conclusion

This is a very preliminary and general consideration of what might be involved

in a computational model of understanding for literary narrative. In addition
 N.M. Ide, J. Vehwzis / AI and literary narrative 61

to giving an overview of AI models of story understanding, it is intended to

provide a broad basis for further thought and research into the ways in and
processes by which narrative texts yield meaning. We show that current AI
models require not only the implementation of more knowledge and inferenc-
ing capabilities, but also some fundumen~al changes in order to handle literary
narrative.
First, story understanding systems must possess far greater thematic knowl-
edge than existing systems possess in order to take into account the complexity
of literary themes. In addition, the representation of meaning proposed in
Conceptual Dependency (which is the principal theory around which story
comprehension systems have been built), or by similar theories, is inadequate
for representing meaning in literary texts, even at the level of the sentence. An
adequate representation scheme must enable access to a greater amount and
variety of the information implicit in the meaning of a sentence, while at the
same time distinguishing what among this information is relevant for the
context in which the sentence appears. One of the fundamental mechanisms
that serves to identify relevant information in a sentence or text is the
foregrounding of textual elements, which in literary texts can be accomplished
with various stylistic and other rhetorical devices as well as through the
violation of expectation. Foregrounded textual elements and the various
relationships that exist among them make up a complex network of interre-
lations across the text, in which can be found the structure of ideas in the text.
A large part of meaning in a literary work comes from sources other than the
sequence of events within the narrative. We have outlined the importance of
processing for narrative comprehension; the overall meaning of a narrative is
not reducible to a final and static representation of the events of which it is
composed, but is also derived from the successive steps that the reader takes in
the process of reading the text. This emphasis on the processes of comprehen-
sion leads us to the incorporation of the reader in a model of narrative
comprehension. In addition to general knowledge, a system for the compre-
hension of literary narrative must include a collection of specific literary
abilities, which because such abilities vary from reader to reader must either
be modifiable in an understanding system, or the system must represent only
one kind of reader. In addition, the goals and plans of the reader in processing
literary texts may be much more complex than for other kinds of narrative (in
particular, the simple narratives that current systems can handle). These goals
and plans also vary among readers and therefore must be modelled explicitly.
If knowledge, literary abilities, and the plans and goals of the reader are
implemented so that they may be varied, the differences in behavior, and
hence in meaning, for different readers can be observed. The model of
understanding that we propose requires an interpreter capable of simulating
different readers, operating at a level outside and surrounding those of current
AI models, which simulate the reader himself.
 62 N. M. Ide, J. Vkronis / A I and lirerary narratrue

We believe that at the least, the discussion in this paper makes it clear that
researchers in AI can benefit by considering the range of stimulating and
challenging problems raised by literary texts. Similarly, literary studies can
gain clarity by attempting to re-cast their assumptions and theories in terms
formal enough to lead to experiments on computers. The lack of cross-fertili-
zation between the fields of Artificial Intelligence and literary studies is
striking; hopefully, this will soon change, to the benefit of all.

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