Alex Calderwood

Melissa Roemmele, John Joon Young Chung, Taewook Kim et al.

Generative AI has established the opportunity to readily transform content from one medium to another. This capability is especially powerful for storytelling, where visual illustrations can illuminate a story originally expressed in text. In this paper, we focus on the task of narrative scene illustration, which involves automatically generating an image depicting a scene in a story. Motivated by recent progress on text-to-image models, we consider a pipeline that uses LLMs as an interface for prompting text-to-image models to generate scene illustrations given raw story text. We apply variations of this pipeline to a prominent story corpus in order to synthesize illustrations for scenes in these stories. We conduct a human annotation task to obtain pairwise quality judgments for these illustrations. The outcome of this process is the SceneIllustrations dataset, which we release as a new resource for future work on cross-modal narrative transformation. Through our analysis of this dataset and experiments modeling illustration quality, we demonstrate that LLMs can effectively verbalize scene knowledge implicitly evoked by story text. Moreover, this capability is impactful for generating and evaluating illustrations.

Daeun Hwang, Samuel Shields, Alex Calderwood et al.

Motivation is an important factor underlying successful learning. Previous research has demonstrated the positive effects that static interactive narrative games can have on motivation. Concurrently, advances in AI have made dynamic and adaptive approaches to interactive narrative increasingly accessible. However, limited work has explored the impact that dynamic narratives can have on learner motivation. In this paper, we compare two versions of Academical, a choice-based educational interactive narrative game about research ethics. One version employs a traditional hand-authored branching plot (i.e., static narrative) while the other dynamically sequences plots during play (i.e., dynamic narrative). Results highlight the importance of responsive content and a variety of choices for player engagement, while also illustrating the challenge of balancing pedagogical goals with the dynamic aspects of narrative. We also discuss design implications that arise from these findings. Ultimately, this work provides initial steps to illuminate the emerging potential of AI-driven dynamic narrative in educational games.

Eric Bolton, Alex Calderwood, Niles Christensen et al.

Automatically generating debates is a challenging task that requires an understanding of arguments and how to negate or support them. In this work we define debate trees and paths for generating debates while enforcing a high level structure and grammar. We leverage a large corpus of tree-structured debates that have metadata associated with each argument. We develop a framework for generating plausible debates which is agnostic to the sentence embedding model. Our results demonstrate the ability to generate debates in real-time on complex topics at a quality that is close to humans, as evaluated by the style, content, and strategy metrics used for judging competitive human debates. In the spirit of reproducible research we make our data, models, and code publicly available.