PICA:Proactive Intelligent Conversational Agent for Interactive Narrative

 

We developed PICA: a proactive intelligent conversational agent for interactive narratives that can guide users through such experiences.

November 5, 2018
International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2018

 

Authors

Jessica Falk (ETH Zurich)

Steven Poulakos (Disney Research)

Mubbasir Kapadia (Rutgers University)

Robert W. Sumner (Disney Research)

PICA:Proactive Intelligent Conversational Agent for Interactive Narrative

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.

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