Stories and belief change

In the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning subfield of artificial intelligence, theories of belief change have had a great impact. Research in this area focuses on the properties of operators that allow us to take into account the evolution of knowledge as new information becomes available. In this context, how can we model the evolution of a listener’s beliefs as he or she listens to a story ? A story can be seen as a sequence of logical formulas indexed by instants, which can be apprehended as a whole in order to draw conclusions linked to the causality of events, or as a sequence of successive revisions of an agent’s beliefs by the information that arrives along the way. With belief change tools, it is then possible to characterize some useful ingredients in storytelling such as surprise and incongruity.