Text to Text : plot unit searches generated from English

Abstract

The story of Macbeth centers around revenge. World War I was started by an act of revenge. Even though these two stories are seemingly unrelated, humans use the same concept to draw meaning from them. Plot units, revenge included, are the common set of structures found in human narrative. They are the mistakes, the successes, the revenges and the Pyhrric victories. They are the basic building blocks of stories. In order to build a computational model of human intelligence, it is clear that we must understand how to process plot units. This thesis takes a step in that direction. It presents an English template for describing plot units and a system that is capable of turning these descriptions into plot-unit searches on stories. It currently processes 26 plot units, and finds 10 plot units spread out over Macbeth, Hamlet, the E-R Cyber Conflict, and a collection of legal case briefs.