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Researcher profile

David Wilmot

David Wilmot contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Shadow-Loom: Causal Reasoning over Graphical World Models of Narratives

Stories hold a reader's attention because they have causes, secrets, and consequences. Shadow-Loom is an experimental open-source framework that turns a narrative into a versioned graphical world model and lets two engines act on it: a causal physics grounded in Pearl's ladder of causation and a recently proposed counterfactual calculus over Ancestral Multi-World Networks; and a narrative physics that scores the same graph against four structural reader-states -- mystery, dramatic irony, suspense, and surprise -- in the tradition of Sternberg's curiosity/suspense/surprise triad, with suspense formalised in the structural-affect line of work on story comprehension and computational suspense. Large language models are used only at the boundary: extraction, rendering, and audit; identification, intervention, and counterfactual reasoning are carried out in typed code over the graph. The system is offered as a research artefact rather than as a benchmarked NLP model; code, fixtures, and pipeline are released open source.

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preprint2022arXiv

Great Expectations: Unsupervised Inference of Suspense, Surprise and Salience in Storytelling

Stories interest us not because they are a sequence of mundane and predictable events but because they have drama and tension. Crucial to creating dramatic and exciting stories are surprise and suspense. The thesis trains a series of deep learning models via only reading stories, a self-supervised (or unsupervised) system. Narrative theory methods (rules and procedures) are applied to the knowledge built into deep learning models to directly infer salience, surprise, and salience in stories. Extensions add memory and external knowledge from story plots and from Wikipedia to infer salience on novels such as Great Expectations and plays such as Macbeth. Other work adapts the models as a planning system for generating original stories. The thesis finds that applying the narrative theory to deep learning models can align with the typical reader. In follow-up work, the insights could help improve computer models for tasks such as automatic story writing and assistance for writing, summarising or editing stories. Moreover, the approach of applying narrative theory to the inherent qualities built in a system that learns itself (self-supervised) from reading from books, watching videos, and listening to audio is much cheaper and more adaptable to other domains and tasks. Progress is swift in improving self-supervised systems. As such, the thesis's relevance is that applying domain expertise with these systems may be a more productive approach for applying machine learning in many areas of interest.

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preprint2020arXiv

Modelling Suspense in Short Stories as Uncertainty Reduction over Neural Representation

Suspense is a crucial ingredient of narrative fiction, engaging readers and making stories compelling. While there is a vast theoretical literature on suspense, it is computationally not well understood. We compare two ways for modelling suspense: surprise, a backward-looking measure of how unexpected the current state is given the story so far; and uncertainty reduction, a forward-looking measure of how unexpected the continuation of the story is. Both can be computed either directly over story representations or over their probability distributions. We propose a hierarchical language model that encodes stories and computes surprise and uncertainty reduction. Evaluating against short stories annotated with human suspense judgements, we find that uncertainty reduction over representations is the best predictor, resulting in near-human accuracy. We also show that uncertainty reduction can be used to predict suspenseful events in movie synopses.

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