Telling Stories through Multi-User Dialogue by Modeling Character Relations

Wai Man Si, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark Riedl


Abstract
This paper explores character-driven story continuation, in which the story emerges through characters’ first- and second-person narration as well as dialogue—requiring models to select language that is consistent with a character’s persona and their relationships with other characters while following and advancing the story. We hypothesize that a multi-task model that trains on character dialogue plus character relationship information improves transformer-based story continuation. To this end, we extend the Critical Role Dungeons and Dragons Dataset (Rameshkumar and Bailey, 2020)—consisting of dialogue transcripts of people collaboratively telling a story while playing the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons—with automatically extracted relationships between each pair of interacting characters as well as their personas. A series of ablations lend evidence to our hypothesis, showing that our multi-task model using character relationships improves story continuation accuracy over strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigdial-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
July
Year:
2021
Address:
Singapore and Online
Editors:
Haizhou Li, Gina-Anne Levow, Zhou Yu, Chitralekha Gupta, Berrak Sisman, Siqi Cai, David Vandyke, Nina Dethlefs, Yan Wu, Junyi Jessy Li
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
269–275
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigdial-1.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigdial-1.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wai Man Si, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, and Mark Riedl. 2021. Telling Stories through Multi-User Dialogue by Modeling Character Relations. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 269–275, Singapore and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Telling Stories through Multi-User Dialogue by Modeling Character Relations (Si et al., SIGDIAL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2021.sigdial-1.30.pdf
Video:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF8fyqWJVBA
Data
CRD3