Usnea: An Authorship Tool for Interactive Fiction using Retrieval Based Semantic Parsing

Ben Swanson, Boris Smus


Abstract
The reader of a choose your own adventure novel and the user of a modern virtual assistant have a subtle similarity; both may, through the right lens, be viewed as engaging with a work of Interactive Fiction. This literary form emerged in the 1970s and has grown like a vine along the branch of modern technology, one guided by the advances of the other. In this work we weave together threads from the Interactive Fiction community and neural semantic parsing for dialog systems, defining the data model and necessary algorithms for a novel type of Interactive Fiction and open sourcing its accompanying authoring tool. Specifically, our work integrates retrieval based semantic parsing predicates into the branching story structures well known to the Interactive Fiction community, relaxing the relatively strict lexical options of preexisting systems.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-demos.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Asli Celikyilmaz, Tsung-Hsien Wen
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
263–269
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-demos.29
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-demos.29
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ben Swanson and Boris Smus. 2020. Usnea: An Authorship Tool for Interactive Fiction using Retrieval Based Semantic Parsing. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 263–269, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Usnea: An Authorship Tool for Interactive Fiction using Retrieval Based Semantic Parsing (Swanson & Smus, ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-demos.29.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928617