Abstract

Computational Linguistics has a long history of applying mathematics to the grammatical and syntactic structure of language; however, applying math to the more complex aspects of language, such as narrative, plot, scenes, character relations, causation, etc. remains a difficult topic. The goal of my research is to bridge the narrative humanities with mathematics, to computationally grasp at these difficult topic, and help develop the field of Narrative Engineering. I view narrative and story with the same mathematical scrutiny as other engineering fields, to take the creativity and fluidity of story and encode it in mathematical representations that have meaning beyond probability and statistical predictions that are the primary function of modern large language models. Included in this research is how stories and narratives are structured, evolve, and change, implying that there exists an inherent narrative computation that we as humans do to merge and combine ideas into new and novel ones. Our thoughts and knowledge and opinions determine the stories we tell, as a combination of everything we have seen, read, heard, and otherwise experienced. Narratives have the ability to inform and change those thoughts and opinions, which then lead to the creation of new and novel narratives. In essence, stories can be seen as a programming language for people. My dissertation, then, is to better understand stories and the environments in which stories are shared. I do this through developing tools that detect, extract, and model aspects of stories and their environments; developing mathematical models of stories and their spread environments; and investigating the impact and effects on stories and their spread environments. I then finish with a discussion on the ethical concerns of research in narrative influence and opinion control.

Degree

PhD

College and Department

Computational, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

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