Tolkien: An Event Based Storytelling System

Since the dawn of human civilization, stories have been a popular medium of communication, both synchronously and asynchronously. Technically, a story is a time-ordered coherent sequence of events. In many applications, heterogeneous data is collected and organized so appropriate stories could be told. In this paper, we present a system that helps in generation of stories using a large database of events with associated multimodal data, called eventbase. We define storytelling as a two step process in which a storyteller can retrieve appropriate events and associated data, and then those are further filtered using preferences of the viewer. We develop this model using a measure of interestingness based on attributes of selected events and the preferences. Using an event system developed in our laboratory, we demonstrate the story telling process in Tolkien as one that generates multiple queries to select coherent interesting events to form a story.