Adaptive storytelling through user understanding

Abstract

Storytelling, when happening face to face, is a highly interactive process. A good storyteller attracts the audience by continuously observing their responses and adjusting the storytelling accordingly. The goal of this project is to simulate this process in digital storytellers. We created an automatic storytelling system that periodically estimates the user's preferences and adapts the content in the subsequent storytelling by balancing novelty and topic consistency. We have performed an empirical evaluation on the effectiveness of our approach. The results indicate that gender and age play important roles in affecting one's subjective experience. For younger subjects, stories with mixed amount of novelty and topic consistency are more preferred while for older subjects, larger amounts of variation are preferred. Additionally, in general, women enjoyed the stories more than men.