The evolution of the fAIble system to automatically compose and narrate stories for children

ABSTRACT

This article describes our long-term research into automated story generation and our resulting story generation architecture called fAIble that incorporates several innovations. fAIble determines each event that occurs in the tale using a combination of scripted sequences and stochastically chosen events. The probability of an event occurring is based on the skills and personalities of the characters who have agency. Event selection is also influenced by the context of the situation faced by the characters. Each event is associated with a description in grammatically-correct natural language that can be narrated orally via text-to-speech. We describe the evolution of fAIble, its architecture and the results of our independent evaluation of each of the four progressively developed fAIble prototypes (fAIble 0, I, II and III), as tested with human test subjects. On a continuous scale where 0 means unacceptable, 1 means acceptable and 2 means optimal, the composite human test subject rating average from the independent tests of the prototypes was 0.933. The paper also describes a summative assessment where test subjects were asked to review stories from all four prototypes and rank them comparatively. These comparative results indicate an improvement from the original (fAIble 0) to the last one (fAIble III).

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative generation
• automated storytelling
• digital storytelling
• automated story generation

Acknowledgments

The research described in this paper was funded by the US National Science Foundation under their International Research Experience for Students (IRES) program via grant #1458272. We would also like to recognize the following members of the research team: Lucas Pasqualin, Max Waldor, Lucas Gonzalez, Lauren Hastings, and Yasmine Moolenaar. Although not co-authors of this paper, this research could not have been successful without their extensive and valuable contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

2. https://github.com/shivam5992/textstat

3. http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0600-0699/0627/Sections/0627.4145.html

4. https://github.com/shivam5992/textstat

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSF [IRES - 1458272].