Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Story generation can best be viewed as a planning task. We show here UNIVERSE, a program that generates melodrama plot outlines using hierarchical planning methods. Examples are given of the program creating story outlines using a set of characters that it also created. Weindicate that story telling is open-ended, does not have to be perfect, and evaluation criteria are unclear, and contrast the sort of planning needed for story telling with other planning tasks. We suggest that certain elements of the methods used by UNIVERSE could be usefully applied toother tasks.