Publikation
A Dialogue System for Conversational NPCs
Tina Klüwer; Peter Adolphs; Feiyu Xu; Hans Uszkoreit
In: Paralinguistic Information and its Integration in Spoken Dialogue Systems. International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology (IWSDS-2011), September 1-3, Granada, Spain, Springer, 2011.
Zusammenfassung
In virtual worlds of multi-user online games such as World of Warcraft and so-
cial platforms such as Second Life Non-Player Characters (NPCs) have become an
essential element. NPCs moderate the game plot, make the artificial world more
vivid and create an immersive environment. They are also necessary to populate
new worlds which otherwise would be deserted and unamusing. Especially, dia-
logue and natural language abilities are important characteristics for entertaining
NPCs, but the capabilities in autonomous acting and communication are still very
limited. Most NPCs do not allow for natural language input and provide only a
simple drop-down menu for dialogues with the user�s avatar.
The system described in this paper provides NPCs which can be applied to vir-
tual worlds. The prototype is running in a world named Twinity, a product of the
Berlin startup company Metaversum1. Our system combines robust state-of-the-art
technologies such as finite-state graphs with sophisticated language technology im-
provements such as statistical dialogue act recognition and semantic analysis to offer
robust and at the same time flexible NPCs for natural language interaction.