Narrative models are all you need!
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For my dissertation I developed a method of summarizing clusters of stories (narrative plans), in order to help story domain authors better understand what kinds of stories are possible. To evaluate the technique, I made this tool that allows you to configure a story world and explore it by clicking on clusters and reading example…
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Narrative planners generate sequences of actions that represent story plots given a story domain model. This is a useful way to create branching stories for interactive narrative systems that maintain logical consistency across multiple storylines with different content. There is a need for story comparison techniques that can enable systems like experience managers and domain…
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Psychological research has demonstrated that as we experience a story several features affect the salience of its events in memory. These features correspond to who? where? when? how? and why? questions about those events. Computational models of salience have been used in interactive narratives to measure which events people most easily remember from the past…
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In interactive narratives, experience management is used to control the world and the NPCs a player interacts with, encouraging particular types of stories or discouraging others. The space of all stories in a narrative can be understood as a story graph, with story states as nodes and actions in the story as directed edges. In…
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Planning algorithms generate sequences of actions that achieve a goal, but they can also be used in reverse: to infer the goals that led to a sequence of actions. Traditional plan-based goal recognition assumes agents are rational and the environment is fully observable. Recent narrative planning models represent agents as believable rather than perfectly rational,…
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Manipulating Narrative Salience in Interactive Stories using Indexter’s Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis
The salience of a narrative event is defined as the ease with which an audience member can recall that past event. This article describes a series of experiments investigating the use of salience as a predictor of player behavior in interactive narrative scenarios. We utilize Indexter, a plan based model of narrative for reasoning about…
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In this paper we present two studies supporting a plan-based model of narrative generation that reasons about both intentionality and belief. First we compare the believability of character plans taken from the spaces of valid classical plans, intentional plans, and belief plans. We show that the plans that make the most sense to humans are…
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Narrative planners would be able to represent richer, more realistic story domains if they could use numeric variables for certain properties of objects, such as money, age, temperature, etc. Modern state-space narrative planners make use of causal links—structures that represent causal dependencies between actions—but there is no established model of a causal link that applies…
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Influencing User Choices in Interactive Narratives using Indexter’s Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis
Indexter is a plan-based model of narrative that incorporates cognitive scientific theories about the salience—or prominence in memory—of narrative events. A pair of Indexter events can share up to five indices with one another: protagonist, time, space, causality, and intentionality. The pairwise event salience hypothesis states that a past event is more salient if it…
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What characters believe, how they act based on those beliefs, and how their beliefs are updated is an essential element of many stories. State-space narrative planning algorithms treat their search spaces like a set of temporally possible worlds. We present an extension that models character beliefs as epistemically possible worlds and describe how such a…
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