Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we report progress on the design of a knowledge representation formalism, based on Allen's temporal logic [Allen, 1984], to be used in a generative model of narratives. Our goal is to develop a model that will simultaneously generate text and meaning representations so that claims about recovery of meaning from text can be assessed. W e take as our domain a class of simple stories, based on Grimm's fairy tales. We base our work on story grammars, as they are the only available framework with a declarative representation. W e provide the logical foundations for developing a story grammar [Rumelhart, 1975] into a generative model of simple narratives. W e have provided definitions to specify the "syntactic" categories of the story grammar and the constraints between constituents.