Towards Representing What Readers of Fiction Believe

Despite the extensive literature on the problem of story understanding, there has been little focus on formally representing some forms of knowledge that are specific to stories, such as how the reader expects information to be presented over the course of reading. To illustrate, the reader of a mystery story may expect to eventually find out who is guilty, and also that the author may first try to mislead them about who is guilty. We propose literary logic, a formalism based on work by Friedman and Halpern for reasoning about dynamic systems, and apply it in representing this sort of knowledge. We also consider issues relating to carrying over world knowledge into fiction, and knowledge of genre conventions.