Telling Stories Knowing Nothing: Tackling the Lack of Common Sense Knowledge in Story Generation Systems

To create human-level stories, story generation systems need extensive common sense knowledge about the world and human psychology. We are exploring a two-step approach to compensate for this lack of world knowledge in a joint research project at ZGDV Darmstadt Digital Storytelling Lab: First, we employ a character-driven drama model to annotate a collection of film scenes, creating an extensible, ‘first-person-perspective' story grammar to substitute the system's lacking theory of mind. Second, we imbue the objects in a game world with knowledge how to achieve a dramatic effect on a protagonist within their specific environment. Combining these two sources of knowledge, we hope to create a system that is capable of generating individual educational game stories for role-playing characters in a large variety of game worlds.