Picture books: Automated story generator

• Main Authors: Hong, Arvin Jasper C., Siy, Joan Tiffany U., Solis, Candice Jean R., Tabirao, Emerald A.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2008
• Subjects: Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/14403
• Institution: De La Salle University

Picture Books us a story-generation system that creates stories based on a given picture. The system creates an abstract story representation of the theme that matches the given picture and uses NLG techniques to generate the sentences of the story. The picture consists of characters, objects and a background selected from a pre-denied set of stickers and background images that enable the system to determine the essential elements of a story namely the characters, objects and setting. The generated stories are for children of age four to six. Two manual evaluations were done to validate the grammar and content of the generated stories. The grammar aspect of the generated stories was given a score of 91.5% (3.66 out of 4 points) by the linguist mainly because of lack of transitional devices and possessive pronouns, while the content aspect of the generated stories was given a score of 88% (3.52 out of 4 points) by the child educators due to their opinion that stories with dialogues are more attractive to children rather than stories with simple declarative sentences. Two automated evaluation were also performed by comparing the generated stories against the reference stories validated by the linguist. Test results showed that the system has a low word error rate of 9.71% and a sentence error rate of 41.96% due mostly on the lack of transitional devices.