Pilot: Expressing Dramatic Character in Dialogue: A Toolkit for Creative Exploration of Linguistic Style

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Computer games and other forms of interactive media have many potential benefits -- ranging from the educational to the economic. Games are used to educate in areas such as computer science, health care, and language learning, while game industry revenue is now larger than feature film box office receipts. But many subjects we would wish to teach, and many genres in which we would like to entertain, are fundamentally limited by current authoring approaches: in particular, the amount of character dialogue that must be hand-authored. This project will use what is known about the creative work of human authors together with advanced techniques from the field of "natural language generation" to explore a new approach to addressing this problem. In particular, it will integrate a new model of dialogue generation into an advanced tool for interactive story authoring, then evaluate the results when both expert and beginning authors work with the tool, giving us our first understanding of the promise of such techniques for enhancing the creativity of authors. The need for a new approach to dialogue is pressing. For example, the forthcoming commercial game LA Noir has a script of 2,200 pages (roughly equivalent to 12 feature films). Producing this amount of dialogue is simply impossible for educational game producers, and is nearing the limit of what commercial producers can manage, yet games can only continue to grow in sophistication by having more dialogue. This research works toward a solution for this dilemma, opening the door to further educational development and economic growth, by enhancing author creativity through cutting edge computer science. In addition, this project will help develop broader understanding of the field of Creative IT, providing a case study of how the knowledge of creative professionals and scientists can combine to produce social benefits that would be impossible for either working alone.