Computationally Modeling Narratives of Social Group Membership with the Chimeria System

Narratives are often used to form, convey, and reinforce memberships in social groups. Our system, called Chimeria, implements a model of social group membership. Here, we report upon the Chimeria Social Narrative Interface (Chimeria-SN ), a component of the Chimeria system, that conveys this model to users through narrative. This component is grounded in a sociolinguistics model of conversational narrative, with some adaptations and extensions in order for it to be applied to an interactive social networking domain. One eventual goal of this work is to be able to extrapolate social group membership by analyzing narratives in social networks; this paper deals with the inverse of that problem, namely, synthesizing narratives from a model of social group membership dynamics. 1998 ACM Subject Classification H.4.3 Communications Applications, H.5.1.b Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities, J.4.c Sociology, K.4.2 Social Issues, K.4.3.b Computer-supported collaborative work