Deep Dungeons and Dragons: Learning Character-Action Interactions from Role-Playing Game Transcripts

An essential aspect to understanding narratives is to grasp the interaction between characters in a story and the actions they take. We examine whether computational models can capture this interaction, when both character attributes and actions are expressed as complex natural language descriptions. We propose role-playing games as a testbed for this problem, and introduce a large corpus1 of game transcripts collected from online discussion forums. Using neural language models which combine character and action descriptions from these stories, we show that we can learn the latent ties. Action sequences are better predicted when the character performing the action is also taken into account, and vice versa for character attributes.