skip to main content
10.1145/3267851.3267892acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesivaConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

PICA: Proactive Intelligent Conversational Agent for Interactive Narratives

Published: 05 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

A narrative relies on the imperfect knowledge of the user to create interactions between the characters that are ultimately used as a plot device to drive the narrative. This motivates our exploration of ways to encode this information, provides means for a user to both query and influence the knowledge, and guides the user based on a model of their experience. We developed PICA: a proactive intelligent conversational agent for interactive narratives that can guide users through such experiences. The underlying knowledge base is designed using a sub-symbolic architecture, which encodes belief models for multiple users and autonomous agents in addition to the actual story knowledge. We also developed a discourse module using Behavior Trees to intuitively design the proactive and reactive capabilities of PICA. We compare our approach to neural networks and symbolic knowledge bases and demonstrate its functionality.

References

[1]
2016. Rasa NLU. https://github.com/RasaHQ/rasa_nlu.
[2]
C. Baral and G. De Giacomo. 2015. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: What's Hot. In Proc. of the 29th AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence. 4316--4317.
[3]
Justine Cassell. 2001. Embodied conversational agents: representation and intelligence in user interfaces. AI magazine 22, 4 (2001), 67.
[4]
Melisachew Wudage Chekol, Giuseppe Pirrò, Joerg Schoenfisch, and Heiner Stuckenschmidt. 2017. Marrying Uncertainty and Time in Knowledge Graphs. In Proc. of the 31st AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence. 88--94.
[5]
A. d'Avila Garcez, K. Broda, and D.M. Gabbay. 2002. Neural-Symbolic Learning Systems: Foundations and Applications. Springer.
[6]
A.S. d'Avila Garcez, K. Broda, and D. M. Gabbay. 2001. Symbolic knowledge extraction from trained neural networks: A sound approach. In Artificial Intelligence, 125. 155--207.
[7]
A.S. d'Avila Garcez and G. Zaverucha. 1999. The connectionist inductive learning and logic programming system. In Applied Intelligence Journal, 11(1). 59--77.
[8]
R Geoff Dromey. 2003. From requirements to design: Formalizing the key steps. In Software Engineering and Formal Methods, 2003. Proceedings. First International Conference on. IEEE, 2--11.
[9]
Markus Eger, Camille Barot, and R Michael Young. 2015. Impulse: a formal characterization of story. In OASIcs-OpenAccess Series in Informatics, Vol. 45. Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik.
[10]
David K. Elson. 2012. Detecting story analogies from annotations of time, action and agency. In Proceedings of the LREC 2012 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, Istanbul, Turkey.
[11]
David K. Elson. 2012. DramaBank: Annotating Agency in Narrative Discourse. In Proc. of the 8th Intl. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation. 2813--2819.
[12]
Iulian Vlad Serban et al. 2017. A Deep Reinforcement Learning Chatbot. CoRR abs/1709.02349 (2017). arXiv:1709.02349 http://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02349
[13]
Christiane Fellbaum. 1998. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. Bradford Books.
[14]
A.L.I.C.E AI Foundation. 2002. ALICE. http://www.alicebot.org/
[15]
A d'Avila Garcez, Tarek R Besold, Luc De Raedt, Peter Földiak, Pascal Hitzler, Thomas Icard, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, Luis C Lamb, Risto Miikkulainen, and Daniel L Silver. 2015. Neural-symbolic learning and reasoning: Contributions and challenges. In AAAI Spring Symposium - Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Integrating Symbolic and Neural Approaches.
[16]
James J. Gibson. 1977. The Theory of Affordances. In Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an ecological psychology. R.Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), 67--82.
[17]
Google. 2016. Google Syntaxnet: Neural models of syntax. Retrieved from github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/syntaxnet.
[18]
Sepp Hochreiter and Juergen Schmidhuber. 1997. Long short-term memory. In Neural Computation. 9(8):1735--1780.
[19]
L. B. Holder, Z. Markov, and I. Russell. 2006. Advances in Knowledge Acquisition and Representation. In J. Artif. Intell. Tools, vol. 15, issue 6. 867--874.
[20]
D Isla. 2005. GDC 2005 Proceeding: Handling Complexity in the Halo 2 AI. Retrieved August 31, 2017 from https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130663/gdc_2005_proceeding_handling_.php
[21]
Mubbasir Kapadia, Seth Frey, Alexander Shoulson, Robert W. Sumner, and Markus Gross. 2016. CANVAS: Computer-assisted Narrative Animation Synthesis. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA '16). Eurographics Association, Goslar Germany, Germany, 199--209.
[22]
F Kurfess. 2002. Integrating symbol-oriented and subsymbolic reasoning methods into hybrid systems. In From Synapses to Rules-Discovering Symbolic Rules from Neural Processed Data. 275--292.
[23]
Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean. 2013. Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space. In ICLR Workshop.
[24]
W. Min, B. Mott, J. Rowe, B. Liu, and J. Lester. 2016. Player Goal Recognition in Open-World Digital Games with Long Short-Term Memory Networks. In Proc. of the Twenty-Fifth Intl. Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press.
[25]
T.W. Morris. 2002. Conversational Agents for Game-Like Virtual Environments. In AAAI Spring Symposium on A. I. and Interactive Entertainment. 82--86.
[26]
Julie Porteous, Marc Cavazza, and Fred Charles. 2010. Applying Planning to Interactive Storytelling: Narrative Control Using State Constraints. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. 1, 2 (Dec. 2010), 10:1--10:21.
[27]
Alejandro Jose Ramirez and Vadim Bulitko. 2012. Telling Interactive Player-specific Stories and Planning for It: ASD+ PaSSAGE= PAST. In Proc. of the Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment.
[28]
Mark O. Riedl and Vadim Bulitko. 2013. Interactive Narrative: An Intelligent Systems Approach. AI Magazine 34, 1 (2013), 67--77.
[29]
Mark O Riedl, Andrew Stern, Don Dini, and Jason Alderman. 2008. Dynamic experience management in virtual worlds for entertainment, education, and training. International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications, Special Issue on Agent Based Systems for Human Learning 4, 2 (2008), 23--42.
[30]
S. Robinson, D. Traum, M. Ittycheriah, and J. Henderer. 2008. What would you ask a conversational agent? Observations of human-agent dialogues in a museum setting. In The 6th Intl. Conf. on Language Resources and Evaluation.
[31]
Iulian V Serban, Alessandro Sordoni, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, and Joelle Pineau. 2015. Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models. In Proc. 30th AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence.
[32]
D. Silver. 2013. On Common Ground: Neural-Symbolic Integration and Lifelong Machine Learning. In 9th Workshop on Neural- Symbolic Learning and Reasoning.
[33]
Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc V. Le. 2014. Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks. In Proc. of the 27th Intl. Conf. on Neural Information Processing Systems - Volume 2 (NIPS'14). MIT Press, Cambridge, 3104--3112.
[34]
P. Tarau and E. Figa. 2004. Knowledge-Based Conversational Agents and Virtual Storytelling. In ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. 39--44.
[35]
Jonathan Teutenberg and Julie Porteous. 2015. Incorporating Global and Local Knowledge in Intentional Narrative Planning. In Proc. of the 2015 Intl. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Richland, SC, 1539--1546.
[36]
David Thue, Vadim Bulitko, Marcia Spetch, and Eric Wasylishen. 2007. Interactive Storytelling: A Player Modelling Approach. In Proc. of the Third AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. 43--48.
[37]
Geoffrey G. Towell and Jude W. Shavlik. 1994. Knowledge-Based Artificial Neural Networks. In Artificial Intelligence, vol. 70, no. 1,2. 119--165.
[38]
Weizenbaum. 1966. Eliza. http://www.med-ai.com/models/eliza.html
[39]
Hong Yu and Mark O Riedl. 2014. Personalized interactive narratives via sequential recommendation of plot points. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 6, 2 (2014), 174--187.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)The Importance of Multimodal Emotion Conditioning and Affect Consistency for Embodied Conversational AgentsProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3581641.3584045(790-801)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Proactivity in Conversational Assistants: The mPLiCA Model Based on a Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2023)10.1007/978-3-031-48306-6_28(275-285)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2023
  • (2022)Interviewing a Virtual Suspect: Conversational Game Characters Using AlexaVideogame Sciences and Arts10.1007/978-3-030-95305-8_8(98-112)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
  • Show More Cited By
  1. PICA: Proactive Intelligent Conversational Agent for Interactive Narratives

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Conferences
        IVA '18: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
        November 2018
        381 pages
        ISBN:9781450360135
        DOI:10.1145/3267851
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

        Sponsors

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 05 November 2018

        Permissions

        Request permissions for this article.

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. Conversational Agents
        2. Hybrid Knowledge Representation
        3. Interactive Narratives
        4. Knowledge Maps

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article
        • Research
        • Refereed limited

        Conference

        IVA '18
        Sponsor:
        IVA '18: International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
        November 5 - 8, 2018
        NSW, Sydney, Australia

        Acceptance Rates

        IVA '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 17 of 82 submissions, 21%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 53 of 196 submissions, 27%

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)20
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
        Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all
        • (2023)The Importance of Multimodal Emotion Conditioning and Affect Consistency for Embodied Conversational AgentsProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3581641.3584045(790-801)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
        • (2023)Proactivity in Conversational Assistants: The mPLiCA Model Based on a Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2023)10.1007/978-3-031-48306-6_28(275-285)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2023
        • (2022)Interviewing a Virtual Suspect: Conversational Game Characters Using AlexaVideogame Sciences and Arts10.1007/978-3-030-95305-8_8(98-112)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
        • (2021)Exploring the State-of-the-Art of Persuasive Design for Smart Personal AssistantsInnovation Through Information Systems10.1007/978-3-030-86797-3_21(316-332)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2021
        • (2019)Towards Modeling the Interplay of Personality, Motivation, Emotion, and Mood in Social AgentsProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3332055(2195-2197)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
        • (2019)Framework for Authoring Repeatable Scenarios in Virtual Environments Populated with Stochastic Virtual AgentsProceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3308532.3329432(221-223)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
        • (2019)FLOSS FAQ chatbot project reuseProceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration10.1145/3306446.3340823(1-8)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2019

        View Options

        Login options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        Figures

        Tables

        Media

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media