Dialog designs in virtual drama: Balancing agency and scripted dialogs

Abstract

Scripts are automatically generated by a story generator and subsequently played by virtual agents. The scripts for actors consist of two parts: movements and dialogs, however, the dialogs are insufficiently addressed in current research of story generation, thereby limiting the generated stories. Therefore, our initial goal was to enable story generators to generate dialogs as sets of character-based actions that are integrated with original story plots. This paper presents a speech-act-based dialog generation framework to define the relationship between dialogs and story plots. In addition, we introduce the manner in which agents may improvise scripted dialogs by selecting various courses of actions. Lastly, a sample scenario was generated according to this framework and demonstrated by virtual agents with the Unreal Development Kit. Our initial results indicated that this framework maintains a balance between agency and scripted dialogs, and that improvised dialogs of virtual agents do not affect the consistency of stories. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.