Prospects for in-depth story understanding by computer

TL;DR

This paper advocates returning to in-depth story understanding by computers, discussing past research, current challenges, and proposing a multi-agent approach with resources for future development.

Contribution

It highlights the need to revisit story understanding research and suggests a multi-agent framework as a promising solution.

Findings

Identifies major challenges in story understanding

Proposes a set of interacting understanding agents

Provides resources and tools for system development

Abstract

While much research on the hard problem of in-depth story understanding by computer was performed starting in the 1970s, interest shifted in the 1990s to information extraction and word sense disambiguation. Now that a degree of success has been achieved on these easier problems, I propose it is time to return to in-depth story understanding. In this paper I examine the shift away from story understanding, discuss some of the major problems in building a story understanding system, present some possible solutions involving a set of interacting understanding agents, and provide pointers to useful tools and resources for building story understanding systems.