Improvisational Storytelling Agents

The problem of improvisational story generation involves one or more agents collaborating in order to create a story without any advance notice of topic. We present a pipeline for an artificial agent that is capable of improvisational storytelling while collaborating with a human agent. Starting with story corpora, we “eventify” sentences, which creates a simplified and abstracted representation. The rest of the pipeline–the agent’s response–is broken into three parts: generating successive events (event-to-event), translating of events back into natural language (event-to-sentence), and plugging the specifics of the story back into the generated sentences (slot filling). We discuss techniques for each of these sub-problems.