Tag: Knowledge Representation

Combining Intentionality and Belief: Revisiting Believable Character Plans

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 those in the overlapping regions of the intentionality and belief spaces. Second, we validate the model’s approach to representing anticipation, where characters form plans that involve actions they expect other characters to take. Using a short interactive scenario we demonstrate that players not only find it believable when NPCs anticipate their actions, but sometimes actively anticipate the actions of NPCs in a way that is consistent with the model.

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Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Combining intentionality and belief: revisiting believable character plans. In Proceedings of the 14th AAAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 222-228, 2018.

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A Possible Worlds Model of Belief for State-Space Narrative Planning

Abstract:

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 space is generated. We also present the results of an experiment which demonstrates that the model meets the expectations of a human audience.

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Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware, Rachelyn Farrell. A possible worlds model of belief for state-space narrative planning. In Proceedings of the 13th AAAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 101-107, 2017.

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Asking Hypothetical Questions about Stories using QUEST

Many computational models of narrative include representations of possible worlds—events that never actually occur in the story but that are planned or perceived by the story’s characters. Psychological tools such as QUEST are often used to validate computational models of narrative, but they only represent events which are explicitly narrated in the story. In this paper, we demonstrate that audiences can and do reason about other possible worlds when experiencing a narrative, and that the Quest knowledge structures for each possible world can be treated as a single data structure. Participants read a short text story and were asked hypothetical questions that prompted them to consider alternative endings. When asked about events that needed to change as a result of the hypothetical, they produced answers that were consistent with answers generated by QUEST from a different version of the story.  When asked about unrelated events, their answers matched those generated by QUEST from the version of the story they read.

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Rachelyn Farrell, Scott Robertson, Stephen G. Ware. Asking hypothetical questions about stories using QUEST. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, pp. 136-146, 2016.

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