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> Why would you want such a system?
If you want to simulate the behavior of humans.
For instance, in a more sophisticated SIMS game the characters would have to have life stories and experiences if they were actually going to talk about anything.
If authoring was possible in the SIMS, it could be used for language teaching, but the characters would have to be made more complex than ants. One of the main problems language teachers face is bringing reality into the classroom and providing their students with something to talk about. They are forever generating what-if types of situations and stories.
Teachers already use simulation games to get people to start thinking and talking about a subject. The Stanford Business school uses them in their banking course.
Another application would be generating use-case stories for the users of a software system. I've done consulting work integrating payroll systems into general ledgers and consolidating the general ledgers of multi-nationals and in every department managers have different sets of goals (issue pay checks, month end closing, produce reports, etc...) that all have different deadlines, all of which is hashed out in innumerable meetings (ugh) There are some quite complex managerial coordination stories to be told. If you could create a couple of different possible stories and just have people check the applicable one or modify it a little or use them as the basis of discussion......people can relate to stories easily and use them to reason about a problem.
Economic simulations where expectations play a crucial role also come to mind. .
I was very happy to see that Lang actually had made some headway into writing computer programs that generate reasonable stories, obviously there's a lot left to be done.
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A Declarative Model for Simple Narratives