Clark Elliott
Jacek Brzezinski
Sanjay Sheth
Robert Salvatoriello
Institute for Applied Artificial Intelligence
School of Computer Science, Telecommunications, and Information Systems
DePaul University,
243 South Wabash Ave., Chicago, IL 60604
email: elliott@cs.depaul.edu, Web: http://www.depaul.edu/ 
elliott
In the Affective Reasoning project we have, over the years, maintained that there is a strong relationship between reasoning about human emotion and reasoning about the stories people tell. In a recent set of exercises we have demonstrated that (a) subjects do project attributions of human emotion interaction into multimedia multi-agent presentations, (b) that using the Affective Reasoning paradigm we can tag basic plot steps in stories with varied interpretations on behalf of each participating agent with relatively little concern for constraints, and (c) that when shown presentations generated by the computer using such tags, subjects form explanations for cohesive, distinct, stories and that they rate the stories as highly plausible. Furthermore, for certain types of scenarios, a single base story and a readily created set of interpretation tags allow the generation of many hundreds of distinct, plausible, and cohesive story-morphs, where the external plot steps remain similar, but the thematic material, and the internal lives of the characters vary greatly.