[MUD-Dev] re: Language Parsing for NPCs

[Robert Zubek]

Aaron Mulder writes:

> I've become interested in working on language processing to allow
> NPCs to carry on more intelligent conversations.  I'm thinking of
> NPCs like a bartender or guard or shopkeeper, though really there
> shouldn't be any particular limit.

cool! i'm currently beginning ph.d. work in a similar area -
understanding what people do in social multiplayer games. i suppose
this isn't as language-intensive as your interest, but i'm butting
against the nlp problem all the time as well (and what a nasty
problem it is! :)


> One of the main things I need is some more source material - it's
> strange, but 50% of all the speakers in my logs are me!  So, any
> logs with conversation you are willing to donate would be a great
> help.  I just wish there was some way to get an NPC's log, with
> all the things PC's said to the NPC...

i'm in the same boat, actually - i've a set of older logs, but they
all involve one of my characters. :) if there were some way to get
third-person logs of conversations without having to start my own
mud, that would be truly wonderful. :) if you or anyone else know of
a way to get such logs, please post!  (also, aaron, if you'd be
interested in swapping logs, let me know...)

and on a related note - having a standard corpus of mud conversation
logs would be of *enormous* help to others trying to do
research-quality work on natural language understanding for
games. however, to my knowledge, no such standard corpora exist
anywhere.

the time might be ripe to start one.


> Anyway, I'm hoping I can support a reasonable degree of
> interaction without devolving into unnecessarily complicated
> sentence structures (like this), but any conversation is a target.

yes, i think that's very much possible - my experience so far has
been that language processing systems need not quite so much
sentence structure parsing, as rather more of pragmatic
understanding of what goes on in a conversation (extract meaning
dependant on context, on history of previous interactions, but also
trying to understand more generally what the speaker is trying to
achieve by speaking to the npc).

actually, i just finished a little toy project doing chatterbots for
half-life (yes, the first-person shooter :), using just a dumb
eliza. the environment was reasonably nice in that the topics or the
sentence structure in the in-game conversation never got too
complicated - but even in that case eliza turned out to be woefully
inadequate. not having a clear discourse support became a major
problem - the bots' utterances would switch disconnectedly from
topic to topic, they would have no memory of what the players were
talking about, and the system had no idea what they were doing
subtextually (ie. bragging, taunting, blaming, trash-talking, etc.).

i still believe interaction understanding is possible with very
little sentence understanding, but the meaning of the interaction
has to come from *somewhere*, and this means that if less
information comes from the sentence, much more will have to be
extracted from the context.


i'd be very interested in hearing what ideas you have for language
understanding - please post!

rob

--
Robert Zubek 
rob at cs.northwestern.edu
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