Who knows what? : perspective-enabled story understanding

Stories are essential to human communication, thus understanding stories is critical to modeling human intelligence. In order to understand a story from multiple characters' perspectives, a reader must form mental models representing each character's knowledge and beliefs. Building on the Genesis story-understanding system, I developed the Perspectives Expert, which enables Genesis to form detailed mental models of characters in a story. I started by annotating stories with characters' entrances and exits, treating stories as theatrical plays. I assumed that characters observe events only while onstage, and I used their observations to populate mental models. Then, inspired by human reasoning, I eliminated explicit stage directions and enabled Genesis to keep track of characters' locations and levels of consciousness. Equipped with this mental-modeling ability, Genesis can retell stories from different characters' perspectives, answer reading-comprehension questions to demonstrate understanding, and perform the first steps of conflict reconciliation by detecting and explaining opposing viewpoints.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Noss, Jessica Marie.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Patrick H. Winston.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113174

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/113174