Archetype-Driven Character Dialogue Generation for Interactive Narrative

Recent years have seen a growing interest in creating virtual agents to populate the cast of characters for interactive narrative. A key challenge posed by interactive characters for narrative environments is devising expressive dialogue generators. To be effective, character dialogue generators must be able to simultaneously take into account multiple sources of information that bear on dialogue, including character attributes, plot development, and communicative goals. Building on the narrative theory of character archetypes, we propose an archetype-driven character dialogue generator that uses a probabilistic unification framework to generate dialogue motivated by character personality and narrative history to achieve communicative goals. The generator’s behavior is illustrated with character dialogue generation in a narrative-centered learning environment, CRYSTAL ISLAND.