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Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game (for AI agents) (arxiv.org)
4 points by iron0013 on Mar 8, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A crowdsourced fantasy text adventure lets people and AI play characters that talk and act in a shared world. Models that read the local scene—its location, objects, and nearby characters—predict what to say and do better than models using only past conversation.

Abstract · Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game

We introduce a large scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research platform for studying grounded dialogue. In it, agents can perceive, emote, and act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. Models and humans can both act as characters within the game. We describe the results of training state-of-the-art generative and retrieval models in this setting. We show that in addition to using past dialogue, these models are able to effectively use the state of the underlying world to condition their predictions. In particular, we show that grounding on the details of the local environment, including location descriptions, and the objects (and their affordances) and characters (and their previous actions) present within it allows better predictions of agent behavior and dialogue. We analyze the ingredients necessary for successful grounding in this setting, and how each of these factors relate to agents that can talk and act successfully.

Jack Urbanek, Angela Fan, Siddharth Karamcheti, Saachi Jain, Samuel Humeau, Emily Dinan, Tim Rocktäschel, Douwe Kiela, Arthur Szlam, Jason Weston
arXiv:1903.03094 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Mar 7, 2019
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