Social Narrative Adaptation using Crowdsourcing

In this paper we present SNACS, a novel method for creating Social Narratives that can be Adapted using information from Crowdsourcing. Previous methods for automatic narrative generation require that the primarily author explicitly detail nearly all parts of the story, including details about the narrative. This is also the case for narratives within computer games, educational tools and Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). While such narratives are well written, they clearly require significant time and cost overheads. SNACS is a hybrid narrative generation method that merges partially formed preexisting narratives with new input from crowdsourcing techniques. We compared the automatically generated narratives with those that were created solely by people, and with those that were generated semi-automatically by a stateof-the-art narrative planner. We empirically found that SNACS was effective as people found narratives generated by SNACS to be as realistic and consistent as those manually created by the people or the narrative planner. Yet, the automatically generated narratives were created with much lower time overheads and were significantly more diversified, making them more suitable for many applications. 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.2.1: Applications and Expert Systems