The integration of narrative and argumentation for a scenario based learning environment in law

Narrative or story telling has long been used to structure and organise human experience. In contrast to logical models of reasoning, narrative models enable complex situations to be understood and recalled by humans readily. There is also some indication that narrative models represent the way in which jurors weigh up the veracity of legal evidence. In this work a narrative model is integrated into a logical reasoning model for the purpose of advancing a learning environment that promises to be engaging and effective. The narrative model includes a representation of the point of a story and a simple story grammar. The learning environment is designed to enable the automated generation of plausible scenarios representing a variety of family law property division cases told from the point of view of numerous characters. Copyright 2005 ACM.