A narrative modeling platform: Representing the comprehension of novelty in open-world systems

Abstract Reasoning is dynamic. Human understanding evolves across changing and unexpected circumstances, whether escaping a war zone or watching a suspenseful movie. General and past knowledge is often insufficient to make sense of these unfolding situations; it must be adapted to account for unexpected inputs. This chapter describes an early-stage prototype of a modeling platform that tracks how humans adjust old information toward new contexts, revising their understanding of real-world situations. The process is modeled as streams of narrative—as an interplay of semantic networks that represent mental, social, and cultural webs of information. Its taxonomy is newly realized in a Unity 3D environment so that annotations can be spatially captured and anchored in inhabitable spaces. The result is a new method for modeling the emergence of unexpected entities and contexts, including shared contexts. This can endlessly connect artifacts of different media and sources in a unifying immersive space. A long-term plan for these models is to inform artificial intelligence that can reason about situations that unfold past the ontological boundaries of their general reference frameworks.