“Scheherazade: Crowd-Powered Interactive Narrative Generation”, 2015-03-04 (; backlinks; similar):
Interactive narrative is a form of storytelling in which users affect a dramatic storyline through actions by assuming the role of characters in a virtual world.
This extended abstract outlines the Scheherazade-IF system, which uses crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence to automatically construct text-based interactive narrative experiences.
…The process begins with a user request for an interactive narrative on a particular topic. The system generates a query to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to solicit example narratives of the given topic, provided in natural language. To simplify the complexity of natural language processing, crowd workers are asked to segment their narratives such that each sentence contains one event. Crowd workers are instructed to use one verb per sentence and to avoid complexities such as conditionals, compound sentences, and pronouns.
the system analyzes the simplified natural language narrative examples to discover the fundamental plot points on which people agree. Sentences from different narrative examples are clustered together according to semantic similarity to create plot events. The simplified language use allows clustering algorithms to discover plot events with relatively high accuracy.
we identify the precedence constraints between plot events. Crowd workers produce noisy and sometimes erroneous answers such as omitting steps, requiring resilience against noise.
…we identify events that can never co-occur in a single narrative experience. We measure the mutual information between events to determine whether they belong to alternative, inconsistent procedures.