The Thematic Illustrator: An Automatic Illustrative Approach to Enhancing Narrative Cohesion

摘要

Adaptive or generated narratives offer personalised and dy- namic delivery of narrative content to users. However their generation or adaption is often based on the literal content of the narrative and not the subtext ignoring many impor- tant narrative principles such as narrative cohesion. Based on our existing work on a thematic model we present the Thematic Illustrator; a system capable of generating content relevant themed illustrations for short stories. The system aims to emphasise core themes and as a result improve the thematic cohesion of the story. We investigate whether this has a tangible effect on the cohesion of the narrative as a whole by using five variables to measure the cohesion of a story with themed and unthemed illustrations. Our results show that thematic noise can be reduced and that there is a demonstrated link between thematic cohesion and some other aspects of narrative cohesion.