Generating stories with morals

Morals play an important role in why storytelling developed, and help provide stories with structure. We describe a storytelling system which generates short stories that convey one of six common morals identified in Aesop’s fables. Morals are represented in terms of patterns of character emotions that arise during the course of a story. To evaluate the system’s effectiveness, we compare system-generated stories with human-authored stories and random event sequences. We find system-generated stories convey morals significantly better than random.6 page(s