Evolutionary Construction of Stories that Combine Several Plot Lines

Although the narrative structure of common entertainment products like Hollywood movies or TV series is generally composed of a number of different plot lines combined into a single narrative discourse, efforts on computational modeling of story generation have to this point focused mostly on the construction of stories with a single plot line. The present paper explores an evolutionary solution to the task of building a story that combines more than one plot line into a single linear discourse. This requires: a set of knowledge resources that capture the main features that influence the decisions involved, a representation suitable for evolutionary treatment for discourses with several plot lines, and a set of fitness functions based on metrics related to the quality of the resulting discourses. The proposed solution produces populations of stories with elaborate discourses that combine several subplots.