Understanding Actors and Evaluating Personae with Gaussian Embeddings

Understanding narrative content has become an increasingly popular topic. Nonetheless, research on identifying common types of narrative characters, or personae, is impeded by the lack of automatic and broad-coverage evaluation methods. We argue that computationally modeling actors provides benefits, including novel evaluation mechanisms for personae. Specifically, we propose two actor-modeling tasks, cast prediction and versatility ranking, which can capture complementary aspects of the relation between actors and the characters they portray. For an actor model, we present a technique for embedding actors, movies, character roles, genres, and descriptive keywords as Gaussian distributions and translation vectors, where the Gaussian variance corresponds to actors' versatility. Empirical results indicate that (1) the technique considerably outperforms TransE (Bordes et al. 2013) and ablation baselines and (2) automatically identified persona topics (Bamman, O'Connor, and Smith 2013) yield statistically significant improvements in both tasks, whereas simplistic persona descriptors including age and gender perform inconsistently, validating prior research.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 201

Tachikuma: Understading Complex Interactions with Multi-Character and Novel Objects by Large Language Models

Recent advancements in natural language and Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled AI agents to simulate human-like interactions within virtual worlds. However, these interactions still face limitations in complexity and flexibility, particularly in scenarios involving multiple characters and novel objects. Pre-defining all interactable objects in the agent's world model presents challenges, and conveying implicit intentions to multiple characters through complex interactions remains difficult. To address these issues, we propose integrating virtual Game Masters (GMs) into the agent's world model, drawing inspiration from Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TRPGs). GMs play a crucial role in overseeing information, estimating players' intentions, providing environment descriptions, and offering feedback, compensating for current world model deficiencies. To facilitate future explorations for complex interactions, we introduce a benchmark named Tachikuma, comprising a Multiple character and novel Object based interaction Estimation (MOE) task and a supporting dataset. MOE challenges models to understand characters' intentions and accurately determine their actions within intricate contexts involving multi-character and novel object interactions. Besides, the dataset captures log data from real-time communications during gameplay, providing diverse, grounded, and complex interactions for further explorations. Finally, we present a simple prompting baseline and evaluate its performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing interaction understanding. We hope that our dataset and task will inspire further research in complex interactions with natural language, fostering the development of more advanced AI agents.Comment: Preliminary version of an ongoing wor