Question Answering in Role-Playing Games

Contents

In this paper, we give a general description of the issues associated with performing basic Question-Answering (QA) tasks against non-player characters (NPCs) within a simple role-playing game (RPG) or virtual world environment. We describe the aspects of this kind of QA system and provide an overview of our initial explorations into the implementation and evaluation of a QA system that is appropriate for RPG environments. We also introduce Keystone, a simple RPG environment that provides a small virtual world that allows different NPC controller backends to be plugged in thus allowing these systems to be evaluated in a more realistic game environment.