Integrating Cognitive, Symbolic, and Neural Approaches to Story Generation: A Review on the METATRON Framework

The human ability to imagine alternative realities has long supported reasoning, communication, and creativity through storytelling. By constructing hypothetical scenarios, people can anticipate outcomes, solve problems, and generate new knowledge. This link between imagination and reasoning has made storytelling an enduring topic in artificial intelligence, leading to the field of automatic story generation. Over the decades, different paradigms—symbolic, neural, and hybrid—have been proposed to address this task. This paper reviews key developments in story generation and identifies elements that can be integrated into a unified framework. Building on this analysis, we introduce the METATRON framework for neuro-symbolic generation of fiction stories. The framework combines a classical taxonomy of dramatic situations, used for symbolic narrative planning, with fine-tuned language models for text generation and coherence filtering. It also incorporates cognitive mechanisms such as episodic memory, emotional modeling, and narrative controllability, and explores multimodal extensions for text–image–audio storytelling. Finally, the paper discusses cognitively grounded evaluation methods, including theory-of-mind and creativity assessments, and outlines directions for future research.