Hendrickx, S. (2007) Virtual storyteller, The : enriching the story by expressing emotions. Master's Thesis / Essay, Artificial Intelligence.
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Abstract
This research project contributes to the development of the Virtual Storyteller of the tiiiversity of Twente by studying emotional expressions. The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework that generates stories based on the emergent behaviour of character agents. The character gents in tile storyteller contain an emotion model that makes them believable characters and tile research strives for a natural and accurate translation of the emotions determined by the emotion model into natural language. In this project the emotion model of the Virtual Storyteller is evaluated linguistically by studying a corpus of fairy tales. Tile corpus study shows that there is a mismatch between the emotions in the emotion model and the emotion lexicon in fairy tales. Some emotions of the model are only expressed mplicitly in fairy tales and much variety exists in the frequencies of the expressed emotions, even within emotions that are regarded as a pair in the Virtual Storyteller. Based on our results we propose some adjustments to the emotion model of the storyteller and we identify lexical items, generally gradable adjectives, to express the emotions. Gradable adjectives often give rise to conversational implicatures when combined with modifiers as in I am not happy. The interpretations of such expressions need to be clear if we want to use them in the Virtual Storyteller to express emotion intensities. We therefore test the theoretic assumptions of weak bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT) about the interpretations of such conversational implicatures by conducting empirical research. The experiment reveals what the interpretations of modified adjectives are, so that we can use these expressions in the storyteller. The results show that some interpretations cannot be systematically related to the weak bidirectional reasoning of OT. For some forms, there is no agreement about what the interpretation is and for other forms, weak bidirectional OT alone cannot explain the interpretations of the readers. Vc conclude how the theory of weak bidirectional OT gives the best fit to the experimental data. Because we aim to relate emotions in the storyteller to other story aspects in a contrast ive way contrast relations are studied theoretically. Just like Lakoff (1971), we distinguish between the semantic opposition and the denial of expectation. For each of these types of contrast, we discuss which relation between two propositions licenses the use of the contrastive connective but and how this restriction for the use of but affects the interpretation made by the hearer. This results in a theoretic claim about how the first proposition in the denial of expectation is weakened by the use of but. But-constructions for emotional expressions in the Virtual Storyteller are presented. Ve propose how the language generation component of the Virtual Storyteller and the input to this component should be adjusted to construct emotional expressions using modifiers and how contrast relations can be used to relate the emotions to other aspects of the story.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master's Thesis / Essay) |
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| Degree programme: | Artificial Intelligence |
| Thesis type: | Master's Thesis / Essay |
| Language: | English |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Feb 2018 07:30 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Feb 2018 07:30 |
| URI: | https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/9017 |
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