Text to Text : plot unit searches generated from English

The story of Macbeth centers around revenge. World War I was started by an act of revenge. Even though these two stories are seemingly unrelated, humans use the same concept to draw meaning from them. Plot units, revenge included, are the common set of structures found in human narrative. They are the mistakes, the successes, the revenges and the Pyhrric victories. They are the basic building blocks of stories. In order to build a computational model of human intelligence, it is clear that we must understand how to process plot units. This thesis takes a step in that direction. It presents an English template for describing plot units and a system that is capable of turning these descriptions into plot-unit searches on stories. It currently processes 26 plot units, and finds 10 plot units spread out over Macbeth, Hamlet, the E-R Cyber Conflict, and a collection of legal case briefs.

Department dc:contributor.department

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

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Nackoul, David Douglas

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Patrick Winston.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about 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/1721.1/61175

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/61175