Natural Language Understanding in Façade: Surface-Text Processing

Façade is a real-time, first-person dramatic world in which the player, visiting the married couple Grace and Trip at their apartment, quickly becomes entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of their marriage. The Façade interactive drama integrates real-time, autonomous believable agents, drama management for coordinating plot-level interactivity, and broad, shallow support for natural language understanding and discourse management. In previous papers, we have described the motivation for Façade’s interaction design and architecture [13, 14], described ABL, our believable agent language [9, 12], and presented overviews of the entire architecture [10, 11]. In this paper we focus on Façade’s natural language processing (NLP) system, specifically the understanding (NLU) portion that extracts discourse acts from player-typed surface text.