Capturing Common Sense Knowledge via Story Generation

ABSTRACT creating animation in blogs. In this system, animation This paper introduces an animation story generation system called WordsAnime using the animation database provided by animation CGM (consumer generated media). A user generates a story by repeating the steps of inputting scenarios and viewing animations. The system presents manual, semiautomatic, and fully automatic modes of creating scenarios using a common knowledge that links different scenarios with each other. The system automatically extracts the common knowledge of the IF–THEN rules via scenario generation. This paper reports attempt to capture common sense knowledge through the workshops on WordsAnime for children. Author Keywords Common sense knowledge, story generation, consumer generated media. ACM Classification Keywords I.2. 6. Learning: Knowledge acquisition. INTRODUCTION WordsAnime was developed for automatically generating content of a three dimensional animation story by inputting or selecting a user’s simple scenario; thus, this system can be operated even by children. The animation is created by combining animation parts corresponding to the words of scenario. The user generates the story by repeating the steps of inputting scenarios and viewing animations. Data on animation parts in an animation database referred to as Animebase correspond to words provided by the Animation CGM (consumer generated media): Anime de Blog [1]. WordsAnime is an application system using Animebase. Anime de Blog can collect 3D animation and image data. Users have indicated the need for a more appealing way of or image data are searched for and selected from a shared consumer-generated database by using simple words. If users cannot locate the appropriate data, they can easily create new data by using an animation editor, and they can upload the new data by entering simple, related words. Once the user uploads a new animation of a particular character, its motion can also be applied to all the other characters through a process called motion retargeting [2], and thus, new animations are created by reusing the uploaded motion data. Drawing from scratch is the traditional way of generating animation. For example, animation can be created in this fashion by using professional three dimensional computer graphics (3DCG) tools. Users require much effort, however, to master professional 3DCG tools, and because they are expensive, they are not for novice users. This limits their creativity because novice users need easier trial and error practice and learning for creating content. Our concept is that by providing animation data corresponding to the natural language, we can enable novice users to create content. We believe that this is highly significant because of its potential for wide applications. WordsAnime has rules of a common knowledge base for automatic scenario generation or scenario suggestion. The system automatically extracted the common knowledge of the IF–THEN rules via scenario generation. Cyc [3] is an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble comprehensive ontology and database of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform humanlike reasoning. Cyc needs an elaborate logical language that precisely specifies the meaning. Our system does not need description of strict knowledge by users. Simply creating stories (or describing easy rules) will collect knowledge of the scenarios. StoryNet [4] is a very large narrative-based knowledge database of story scripts that can be used for common sense reasoning. ComicKit [5] is an interface for acquiring a StoryNet script over the Internet. ComicKit can also extract rules of scenario automatically when the user is creating comics using arranged graphics. specific permission and/or a fee.