Towards a Narrative Mind: The Creation of Coherent Life Stories for Believable Virtual Agents

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes an approach to create coherent life stories for Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) in order to achieve long-term believability. We integrate a computational autobiographic memory, which allows agents to remember significant past experiences and reconstruct their life stories from these experiences, into an emotion-driven planning architecture. Starting from the literature review on episodic memory modelling and narrative agents, we discuss design considerations for believable agents which interact with users repeatedly and over a long period of time. In the main body of the paper we present the narrative structure of human life stories. Based on this, we incorporate three essential discourse units and other characteristics into the design of the autobiographic memory structure. We outline part of the implementation of this memory architecture and describe the plan for evaluating the architecture in long-term user studies.

Enhancing Human Computer Interaction with Episodic Memory in a Virtual Guide

“…Johnson [4] built an artificial fighter pilot that makes use of episodic memory to explain itself during debriefing. Ho [3] built an autobiographic memory system for an agent to locate resources encountered before and used it in further work to enhance virtual characters, so that they were able to talk about personal past experiences. Tecuci and Porter [10] created a generic memory module for events, where a generic episode has three dimensions: context, contents, and outcome, but only used it for planning.…”

Supporting narrative understanding of children with autism: A story interface with autonomous autobiographic agents

“…As one of the primary functions of AM is to share personal experience with others through storytelling [10], in our previous work we created computational models of AM for both Artificial Life agents [31] and synthetic characters in interactive narrative environments [32]. The concept of Autobiographic agent was first defined in [33, page 5] as "an embodied agent which dynamically reconstructs its individual 'history' (autobiography) during its life-time.…”

“…We also took inspiration from human life stories and illustrated an implementation for agents' storytelling memory structure, which essentially incorporates human narrative discourse units and the reconstructive nature of human autobiographic memory [32]. Through the creation of agents' own life stories, we expect that this memory can help agents to 1) express their internal subjective sense of "self" and 2) show continuity of the "self".…”

“…A more detailed overview for the interrelationship between autobiographic agents and narrative in the area of Intelligent Virtual Agents can be found in [32].…”

Adapting a Virtual Agent’s Conversational Behavior by Social Strategies

“…For instance, so called companion agents are envisioned to interact over a long period of time with, or even beyond the lifetime of, their owners [8], [7]. Human-like memory systems, i.e., autobiographic and episodic memories, are employed to improve believability of such agents [3], [2]. However, these systems focus on the agent's own experiences.…”