On the Evolving Transformation System Representation of Fairy Tales

This thesis presents an initial application of the Evolving Transfor­mation System (ETS) formalism to the structural representation of Russian fairy tales. This work was motivated by the needs of in­formation retrieval (IR) in general, but specifically concentrates on pro­posing a new type of document representation. The new represen­tation is based on the temporal or constructive process of events that occur in the mind of the generic fairy tale listener/reader. Representing documents in this way yields several advantages to using ETS over traditional IR techniques, such as being able to retrieve partial in­formation from a document (i.e. a single sentence or paragraph), fast searching by traversing the multilevel hierarchial class structure ge­nerated by the ETS intelligent process, and locating similar documents based on structural similarity rather than key words. Moreover, the ETS formalism suggests an explanation for the mechanism behind plot anticipation by an experienced reader as well as various levels of fairy tale conceptualization.