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...