A Computational Feature Analysis for Multilingual Character-to-Character Dialogue

Natural language generation systems to date have concentrated on the tasks of explanation generation, tutorial dialogue, automated software documentation, and similar technical tasks. A largely unexplored area is narrative prose generation, or the production of texts used in stories such as novels, mysteries, and fairy tales. We present a feature analysis of one complex area of NLG found in narrative prose but not in technical generation tasks: character-to-character dialogue. This analysis has enabled us to modify a surface realization system to include the necessary features that dialogue requires and thus to write the types of texts found in narratives.