Reviewing Propp’s Story Generation Procedure in the Light of Computational Creativity

Abstract

Vladimir Propp’s analysis of Russian folk tales is known to have produced a semi-formal description of the structure of these tales that has acted as inspiration for several story generation systems, both sequential and interactive. Its exhaustive description of the constituent elements of tales of this kind, and the enumeration of the patterns they follow provided a very useful starting point for researchers looking for computational implementations of story generators. However, it is less generally known that in his book Propp also proposed a procedure for the generation of new tales based on his analytical framework. Although this generative procedure is much less formal than its analytical counterpart, it is one of the first existing instances of a creative process described procedurally. Of particular interest for the field of creative story generation is the number of issues that are declared relevant but not explored in detail. The present paper revisits Propp’s description and focuses on the task of generating the sequence of character functions that determine the plot of the tale. For this task, a number of possible computational implementations are explored, in search for those that produce better results in terms of a number of simple evaluation metrics inspired by Propp’s formalism.