Generating Narratives

2.6.4.1 What is a Narrative?

“When somebody tells you his life... it is a narrative achievement” (Bruner, 2004: 692-693). Hardy (1968: 5) stated the relationship between life and narrative as “we

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dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair,

believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative”. As described by Riedl and Young (2004: 5), “A narrative is a sequence

of events that describes how the story world changes over time”.

Indeed, narrative is one of most important approaches to spreading knowledge (Carr, 1986; Tuffield et al., 2005). From the earliest times, humans began to transmit knowledge as narrative, such as telling stories or cave writing. Narrative is not only a combination of concepts, as Niehaus and Yong (2009: 75) stated, but “rely on the

readers to use narrative conventions and reasoning to complete their understanding”

and thereby bring their own meaning into the topic. Biological research shows that reading a narrative activates more brain regions than reading just words and sentences (Xu et al., 2005). Furthermore narratives can also be used to support keyword text searches using information retrieval techniques (Chen, 2009; Jaimes et al., 2004), which is the natural method that users have to locate knowledge using WWW search engines.

Our life is a sequence of events and actions. Everything we see, learn, and do becomes part of a story. This is the way we learn about the world around us and this is the way we should present our knowledge (Schank, 2000). A narrative may thus be seen as a way of presenting the captured events using all contexts of what had happened (Fatah gen Schieck et al., 2003).

In the lifelogging domain, some researchers have noticed the importance of generating narratives from lifelog data. In the existing research into lifelog, the textual annotation has been used to describe each event (Aizawa, 2005). As indicated

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by Xu et al. (2005), narratives are known to have cognitive processing advantages when compared with annotations.

In a more recent study, Niehaus and Young (2009) mentioned that the user would like to add information in order to complete his understanding by using inferences when reading narratives. With these inferences, the facts and events presented follow a smoother logic, and they seem much more cohesive. To the reader, narrative is not only the combination of annotations; but more than that; narrative can give more information to users when they read it by adding more relative knowledge.

2.6.4.2 Approach to Narrative Generation

Narrative has shown potential to help people recall their lives; however, users do not want to spend time editing or authoring their narratives, if there is no tool to aid their efforts (Appan et al., 2004). For lifelogging, the narrative should describe how the life experience has progressed and changed over time. Rather than being a sequence of ‘I did < something > at that < time >’, ‘I did < something else > at the < time >

at that place’, the narrative generation process should aim to represent life

experience in a more natural manner, for example, the ‘I did something else at the

next event time’ narrative could be represented more naturally as ‘After arrival, I

started to < something > at about < time >’. The narrative generation in this study

consists of three sub-processes, namely fabula, sjuzet, and discourse generation. The fabula1 and sjuzet2 are from Russian words and have been “described by modem

1 Fabula: “фабула” means that the sequence of events, or history, as they apparently happened in the Story (McVeigh, 2008).

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literary theorists as, respectively, the timeless and the sequenced aspects of story”

(Bruner, 2004: 694). In other words, the fabula is the raw material for a story and the sjuzet is how the story is told, i.e. the structure. According to Cheong and Young (2008), a fabula is a story world that includes all the events, characters, and situations in a story. In this study, fabula is a series of sentences based on the detected contexts and segmented events; sjuzet is a paragraph of narratives generated from the fabula without the repeated sentences; and discourse is a paragraph of narratives with an illustrated picture/keyframe taken during the event. A detailed example for fabula, sjuzet and discourse is provided in Table 6.1 in Chapter 6.

Narrative generation is a process that involves the selection of narrative content (the events that will be presented to an audience), ordering of narrative content, and presentation of narrative content through discourse (Riedl and Young, 2010). When describing a narrative approach to data representation, Harper et al. (2007: 3) concluded that “the ability to juggle-up the narrative of life to create evocative

stories was also a bonus”. Gemmell et al. (2005) described how to use many types

of data collected by the MyLifeBits system to construct stories as a response to queries. With the additional captions of images and audio clips, the narrative can be generated as shown in Figure 2.3. In their experiments, Gemmell et al. (2005) mostly used time and location contexts, hence only simple narratives can be generated.

Additional research has taken place on generating narrative presentation on lifelogs. For example, Byrne et al. (2011) asked participants to manually choose multimedia data collected by lifelogging tools and to organise them to generate stories. Therefore, it is not real narrative generation but storytelling. In Hammerl et al. (2012), the narratives they generated were a list of activities ordered by time.

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Inspired by and extended these existing studies, this study generates narratives based on multiple types of contexts and the segmented events. The details will be described in Chapter 6.

Based on the above description on the concept (what), advantage (why) and the process (how) of narratives, we propose the following hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2: A meaningful textual narrative that accurately represents an event can be generated automatically.

Figure 2.3: The interface of telling stories with MyLifeBits

Note: All images associated with a narrative are generated using time and location. Source: Gemmell et al. (2005)