Domain Authoring Assistant for Intelligent Virtual Agents
This addresses a domain-specific problem for creative authors and planning experts in developing intelligent virtual agents, but it is incremental as it automates an existing workflow.
The paper tackles the challenge of manually translating natural language descriptions of virtual characters into planning domains, which is time-consuming and hinders creativity, by introducing an authoring assistant tool that automates this process and identifies missing information.
Developing intelligent virtual characters has attracted a lot of attention in the recent years. The process of creating such characters often involves a team of creative authors who describe different aspects of the characters in natural language, and planning experts that translate this description into a planning domain. This can be quite challenging as the team of creative authors should diligently define every aspect of the character especially if it contains complex human-like behavior. Also a team of engineers has to manually translate the natural language description of a character's personality into the planning domain knowledge. This can be extremely time and resource demanding and can be an obstacle to author's creativity. The goal of this paper is to introduce an authoring assistant tool to automate the process of domain generation from natural language description of virtual characters, thus bridging between the creative authoring team and the planning domain experts. Moreover, the proposed tool also identifies possible missing information in the domain description and iteratively makes suggestions to the author.