Abstract

The knowledge of the narrative agent not only constitutes the content and meaning of the narrative itself, but is also closely related to the emotional response of the recipient. Also, the disparity of knowledge between narrative agents is an important factor in making a narrative richer and more interesting. But It tends to be treated as a sub-topic of narration theory or genre/style studies rather than an independent subject of narrative studies or criticism. In this paper, I propose a model that can systematically and quantitatively analyze the knowledge of narrative agents. The proposed model consists of the knowledge structure that represents a narrative, the knowledge state that expresses the knowledge of narrative agent as a degree of belief, and the knowledge flow that means changes in the knowledge state according to the development of events. In addition, the formal notation of the knowledge structure and a probabilistic inference model that could obtain the state of knowledge were proposed, and the knowledge structure and knowledge flow were analyzed by applying the model to the actual narrative. It is expected that the proposed model will be of practical help in the creation and evaluation of narratives.