Towards automated generation of scripted dialogue: some time-honoured strategies

Piwek, Paul and van Deemter, Kees (2002). Towards automated generation of scripted dialogue: some time-honoured strategies. In: Proceedings of EDILOG: 6th workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, 4-6 Sep 2002, Edinburgh, UK, pp. 141–148.

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to introduce automated generation of scripted dialogue as a worthwhile topic of investigation. In particular the fact that scripted dialogue involves two layers of communication, i.e., uni-directional communication between the author and the audience of a scripted dialogue and bi-directional pretended communication between the characters featuring in the dialogue, is argued to raise some interesting issues. Our hope is that the combined study of the two layers will forge links between research in text generation and dialogue processing. The paper presents a first attempt at creating such links by studying three types of strategies for the automated generation of scripted dialogue. The strategies are derived from examples of human-authored and naturally occurring dialogue.