pear to be missing, such as the one between “John shows
gun” and “John gives Sally bag” in Figure 5 (left). How-
ever, when the options are presented to human players,
they might naturally make the more logical choices. Future
experimentation will determine the effects of flaws such as
these on real human players.
Future Work
Currently SCHEHERAZADE can acquire a plot graph and
execute it interactivity. Future work will involve the use of
drama management to improve NPC event selection, which
is currently shallow. We also note that the current knowl-
edge structures do not support sophisticated textual de-
scriptions of events, as seen in Interactive Fictions. We
will continue to leverage the crowdsourcing paradigm to
create richer knowledge structures that drive text-to-scene
algorithms (Coyne, Bauer, & Rambow 2011).
Conclusions
In this paper, we introduce the problem of automatic
creation of interactive narratives. The S
CHEHERAZADE
system allows a human user to specify any topic that he or
she wishes to convert into an interactive experience. Our
system overcomes knowledge bootstrapping issues by
tapping the experiences and creativity of humans via
crowdsourcing services to automatically construct an exe-
cutable plot graph. It is shown the system can handle noisy
input narratives with omitted events and several variations
of the same topic. The work presented here is an important
first step toward the goal of creating AI systems that
minimizes the cost of the authoring for interactive
narratives. We envision that reduced authoring cost will
one day bring about large-scale applications of AI
techniques previously considered intractable to build.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the U.S.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
for this research.
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John enters bank.
John sees Sally.
John waits in line.
John approaches Sally.
Sally greets John.
John hands Sally a note.
The note demands money.
Sally reads note.
Sally opens cash drawer.
Sally collects money.
John gives Sally bag.
John shows gun.
Sally puts money in bag.
Sally presses alarm.
Sally gives John Bag.
John takes the bag.
Sally is scared.
John leaves bank.
Police arrests John.
John covers face.
John enters bank.
John waits in line.
John sees Sally.
John approaches Sally.
John gives Sally bag.
John pulls out gun.
John points gun at Sally.
Sally scared.
Sally screams.
John demands money.
Sally collects money.
Sally puts money in bag.
Sally presses alarm.
John takes the bag.
John leaves bank.
Police arrests John.
Figure 5. Example Stories