Abstract

Computational and Cognitive Aspects of Narratives Mark A. Finlayson 1 , Bernhard Fisseni 2,8 , Dedre Gentner 3 , Richard Gerrig 4 , Benedikt L¨owe 5,8 , Jeffrey Loewenstein 6 , Inderjeet Mani 7 , Jan Christoph Meister 8 , R. Michael Young 9 Massachusetts Institute of Technology ([email protected]) Universit¨at Duisburg-Essen ([email protected]) 3 Northwestern University ([email protected]) 4 Stony Brook University ([email protected]) 5 Universiteit van Amsterdam ([email protected]) 6 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ([email protected]) 7 Children’s Organization of Southeast Asia ([email protected]) Universit¨at Hamburg ({bernhard.fisseni,benedikt.loewe,jan-c-meister}@uni-hamburg.de) 9 North Carolina State University ([email protected]) Abstract wide range of fields including cognitive science, psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, sociology, anthro- pology, linguistics, logic, and philosophy. To foster and en- courage this community, the Computational Models of Nar- rative 1 (CMN) workshop series was founded in 2009. The series was so titled because we believe that a true science of narrative must adhere to the principle espoused by Herbert Simon in his book The Sciences of the Artificial: that without computational modeling the science of a complex human phe- nomenon such as narrative will never be successful, and that computational models are the proper lingua franca of such a diverse, inter-disciplinary community. Because the workshop series is relatively new, and the re- search community is still growing and developing, it was decided to embed the early workshops in the conferences of different intersecting communities, in order to promote cross-fertilization and a more diverse membership. In 2010, the second workshop was hosted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) as one of its Fall Symposia. In 2012, the third workshop was hosted by the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), which is a part of the computational linguistics community. In 2013, the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative will be held in Hamburg, Germany, directly after CogSci 2013 as a satellite event. The symposium described here is the on-site event associated with the workshop, and is intended to highlight the intersection between cognitive sci- ence and the topics covered in the workshop. Narrative, a distinctly cognitive phenomenon, has long been of interest to the disciplines that comprise cognitive science. The past decade has seen a resurgence of work using com- putational methods to understand, manipulate, generate, and leverage narratives. This symposium, which is held in asso- ciation with the Fourth International Workshop on Compu- tational Models of Narrative (CMN’13), a satellite event of CogSci 2013, will focus on aspects of the scientific and com- putational understanding of narrative that intersect with cog- nitive science. The speakers and moderators are drawn from diverse fields including cognitive psychology, artificial intel- ligence, cognitive science, computational linguistics, and the humanities, and they will focus on a variety of topics includ- ing: narrative and its role in analogy, education, and persua- sion; challenges in the representation of syntax, discourse, and semantics of narrative; psychological and neuropsychological aspects of narrative; and the growing integration of computa- tional models of narrative in humanities research. Keywords: Computational Models of Narrative Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology and serve an im- portant cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear that, to truly understand and explain human intelligence, be- liefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why narrative is universal and explain the function it serves. Cognitive science has long recognized the importance of narrative as an activity that engages diverse and important cognitive facilities, as well as a phenomenon that is worthy of study in its own right. After a long period of dormancy, the past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the formal understanding and computational modeling of of narrative, as well as a more recent boom in cognitive, psychological, and neuroscientific studies relating to narrative. This symposium is an attempt to catalyze the interaction between the research community working on computation-compatible approaches to narrative with cognitive science community proper. Speakers The symposium will be moderated jointly by the workshop co-chairs, Mark Finlayson and Benedikt L¨owe. Our speak- ers and moderators span multiple fields, highlighting the inter-disciplinarity of this symposium. The moderators bring expertise in artificial intelligence, computer science, philos- ophy, and mathematical logic. Among the speakers, Jeffrey Loewenstein and Dedre Gentner represent cognitive science proper, and they will discuss applying work on analogy to advance our understanding of business practice and psychol- The Computational Models of Narrative Workshop Series The research community in question aims to advance the sci- entific understanding of narrative through progress across a 1 http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/