Say Anything

Abstract

We describe Say Anything, a new interactive storytelling system that collaboratively writes textual narratives with human users. Unlike previous attempts, this interactive storytelling system places no restrictions on the content or direction of the user’s contribution to the emerging storyline. In response to these contributions, the computer continues the storyline with narration that is both coherent and entertaining. This capacity for open-domain interactive storytelling is enabled by an extremely large repository of nonfiction personal stories, which is used as a knowledge base in a case-based reasoning architecture. In this article, we describe the three main components of our case-based reasoning approach: a million-item corpus of personal stories mined from internet weblogs, a case retrieval strategy that is optimized for narrative coherence, and an adaptation strategy that ensures that repurposed sentences from the case base are appropriate for the user’s emerging fiction. We describe a series of evaluations of the system’s ability to produce coherent and entertaining stories, and we compare these narratives with single-author stories posted to internet weblogs.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Sep 01, 2012
Source ID
10.1145/2362394.2362398

Entities

People

  • Andrew S. Gordon
  • Reid Swanson

Organizations

  • United States Army
  • University of California, Santa Cruz
  • University of Southern California

Tags

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.