Automating Direct Speech Variations in Stories and Games

Abstract: Dialogue authoring in large games requires not only content creation but the subtlety of its delivery, which can vary from character to character. Manually authoring this dialogue can be tedious, time-consuming, or even altogether infeasible. This paper utilizes a rich narrative representation for modeling dialogue and an expressive natural language generation engine for realizing it, and expands upon a translation tool that bridges the two. We add functionality to the translator to allow direct speech to be modeled by the narrative representation, whereas the original translator supports only narratives told by a third person narrator. We show that we can perform character substitution in dialogues. We implement and evaluate a potential application to dialogue implementation: generating dialogue for games with big, dynamic, or procedurally-generated open worlds. We present a pilot study on human perceptions of the personalities of characters using direct speech, assuming unknown personality types at the time of authoring.