Automatic Story Generation by Learning from Literary Structures

Are mind and machine capable of solving the same tasks? Creativity is one of the arguments that some philosophers and psychologists use as a proof of what computers cannot achieve; however, these arguments might be based on a misconception of what both intelligence and creativity mean. This book provides arguments supporting that creativity, as storytelling, can be emulated through computer programs. The assumption of creativity presents a major problem: Complexity. Even if we consider creativity just as a product of novel ways of achieving a goal, the number of combinations found when dealing with the ‘real world’ is astronomically huge. We can recall The Library of Babel (Borges, 1944), a library that contains any possible book that could be written in the history of humanity. This metaphor reveals the combinatory problem that emerges if a brute force algorithm is designed to generate texts. According to our hypothesis, our proposal is a heuristic that uses simple syntactic and semantic properties found in a text corpus in order to generate novel and coherent fiction texts based on what has been already written.