Slant

The Slant project is an international collaboration to further develop our large-scale automatic story generator. Slant’s components work together on a blackboard to develop a story representation, which is realized by Curveship. Slant is an inquiry into literary creativity and a poetic contribution.

The story generation system Slant incporates code and concepts from manys years of work by Prof. Nick Montfort (MIT, the Trope Tank), Prof. Fox Harrell (MIT, the ICE Lab), and Prof. Rafael Pérez y Pérez (UAM-Cuajimalpa & UNAM). Slant has been developed by these three and graduate student collaborators Iván Guerrero (UNAM), Erik Stayton (MIT), and Andrew Campana (Harvard).

Architecture & Fundamentals: Slant consists of a blackboard collaboration between several different components, initially three. These very different components (one based on Pérez y Pérez’s MEXICA, one based on Harrell’s GRIOT, and one newly developed for Slant) add to a story representation, influencing each other as they do so. When the components have indicated that the representation is complete, it is realized via a text generation pipeline, beginning with Harrel’s Griot-GEN and continuing to the three-stage text generation pipeline of Montfort’s Curveship.

The blackboard architecture for developing the story representation, and the Slantstory XML format that is used, open up new possibilities for collaboration between creative literary systems, allowing models of creativity to be developed and added in different configurations.

Publications:

Montfort, Nick, Erik Stayton, and Andrew Campana. “Expressing the Narrator’s Expectations.” Proceedings of Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7 ((int)7), Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 17-18 June 2014.
Montfort, Nick, Rafael Pérez y Pérez, D. Fox Harrell, and Andrew Campana. “Slant: A Blackboard System to Generate Plot, Figuration, and Narrative Discourse Aspects of Stories.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) 2013, Sydney, 12-14 June 2013.