Autonomous Dialogue for Interactive Story Telling

Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment I

Volume

Papers from the 2001 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

We are investigating techniques for supporting autonomous dialogue in interactive story telling. That is, instead of writing a script for every possible sequence of events, we would like to develop an approach in which story characters have more autonomy in deciding what to say when. We describe our current research on applying dialogue games theory to interactive story telling. We illustrate the theory by analyzing a segment of dialogue from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We conclude that this theory may be relevant to supporting autonomous dialogue in two respects. First, the set of possible dialogue moves at any point in story time is constrained in part by dialogue game conventions. Second, dialogue games can be exploited by the author to contribute to story telling effects.