Causal link semantics for narrative planning using numeric fluents

Abstract

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 to actions with numeric preconditions and effects. In order to develop a semantic definition for causal links that handles numeric fluents and is consistent with the human understanding of causality, we designed and conducted a user study to highlight how humans perceive enablement when dealing with money. Based on our evaluation, we present a causal semantics for intentional planning with numeric fluents, as well as an algorithm for generating the set of causal links identified by our model from a narrative plan.