Automated Extension of Narrative Planning Domains with Antonymic Operators

Abstract

AI Planning has been widely used for narrative generation and the control of virtual actors in interactive storytelling. Planning models for such dynamic environments must include alternative actions which enable deviation away from a baseline storyline in order to generate multiple story variants and to be able to respond to changes that might be made to the story world. However, the actual creation of these domain models has been a largely empirical process with a lack of principled approaches to the definition of alternative actions. Our work has addressed this problem and in the paper we present a novel automated method for the generation of interactive narrative domain models from existing non-interactive versions. Central to this is the use of actions that are contrary to those forming the baseline plot within a principled mechanism for their semi-automatic production. It is important that such newly created domain content should still be human-readable and to this end labels for new actions and predicates are generated automatically using antonyms selected from a range of on-line lexical resources. Our approach is fully implemented in a prototype system and its potential demonstrated via both formal experimental evaluation and user evaluation of the generated action labels.