Remember That Time? Telling Interesting Stories from Past Interactions

Morteza Behrooz, Reid Swanson, Arnav Jhala

Abstract: Sociability is a human trait that plays a central part in relationships over time. Today, humans are increasingly in long-term interactions with intelligent agents, which have proven most useful when they are sociable. Such sociability requires the agent to remember and appropriately refer to past interactions. A common way in which humans refer to their past interactions and collaborations is through storytelling. Such stories, often abbreviated, include a small set of interesting and extraordinary events. We propose the design, development and preliminary evaluation of a generic computational architecture for finding and retelling such interesting event sequences. Our system mines interesting interaction episodes in a corpus of prior interactions. Initial evaluation of interactions selected by the system for retelling are encouraging. A future goal of the research is to support collaborative composition of stories about prior interactions between humans and agents in a mixed-initiative framework to produce interesting retellings.