Modelling the Creative Processes Behind the Appreciation, Generation, and Criticism of Literature

The aim of my research is to simulate the active processes that are involved in the appreciation and generation of story narratives in order to create an agent that can, at least within the confines of a narrow domain, interpret stories; create new stories; and, most importantly, explain its own interpretations and creative decisions in a natural language commentary. Stories are at the heart of human cognition and communication and an ability to deal in stories will be an important skill for an artificially intelligent agent, especially one that interacts with humans.

I hope to contribute towards an understanding of how an artificial agent can have an awareness of what makes a story interesting and well-structured; can borrow elements from remembered episodes when creating new ones; and can evaluate its own work. The focus of research is more on the agent's self-evaluation and commentary rather that on the production of high-quality literary artifacts themselves.

There are three main reasons for this focus: (1) it is clear that one of the central ingredients for creativity is an ability to evaluate artifacts, not just to produce them; (2) there is a growing recognition among researchers of a need for more explainable artificial intelligence models - an agent that explains its decision making will contribute to this; (3) an agent that explains itself will require some degree of self-perception, an ability which is likely important for future work in artificial general intelligence and consciousness.

I am currently trying to work within a hybrid symbolic/connectionist system as I believe it is important to take advantage of the best of both of these paradigms and to produce a model which is interpretable and can serve as a possible explanation of human intelligence.