NPCEditor: A Tool for Building Question-Answering Characters

Anton Leuski, David Traum


Abstract
NPCEditor is a system for building and deploying virtual characters capable of engaging a user in spoken dialog on a limited domain. The dialogue may take any form as long as the character responses can be specified a priori. For example, NPCEditor has been used for constructing question answering characters where a user asks questions and the character responds, but other scenarios are possible. At the core of the system is a state of the art statistical language classification technology for mapping from user's text input to system responses. NPCEditor combines the classifier with a database that stores the character information and relevant language data, a server that allows the character designer to deploy the completed characters, and a user-friendly editor that helps the designer to accomplish both character design and deployment tasks. In the paper we define the overall system architecture, describe individual NPCEditor components, and guide the reader through the steps of building a virtual character.
Anthology ID:
L10-1449
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/660_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anton Leuski and David Traum. 2010. NPCEditor: A Tool for Building Question-Answering Characters. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
NPCEditor: A Tool for Building Question-Answering Characters (Leuski & Traum, LREC 2010)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/660_Paper.pdf