Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The generation of extended plots for melodramatic fiction is an interesting Artificial Intelligence task --- one that requires the application of generalization techniques to carry out fully, UNIVERSE is a story-telling program that uses plan-like units, "plot fragments" to generate plot outlines. By using a rich library of plot fragments and a well-developed set of characters, UNIVERSE can create a wide range of plot outlines. In this paperm we illustrate how UNIVERSE's plot fragment library might be automatically extended using explanation-based generalization methods. Our methods are based on analysis of a televeision melodrama