Archive for May, 2007

9 May

Towards Player Preference Modeling for Drama Management in Interactive Stories

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Game AI, Language. Tagged: , , , .

There is a growing interest in producing story based game experiences that do not follow fixed scripts pre-defined by the author, but change the experience based on actions performed by the player during his interaction. In order to achieve this objective, previous approaches have employed a drama management component that produces a narratively pleasing arc based on an author specified aesthetic value of a story, ignoring a player’s personal preference for that story path. Furthermore, previous approaches have used a simulated player model to assess their approach, ignoring real human players interacting with the story-based game.

This paper presents an approach that uses a case-based player preference modeling component that predicts an interestingness value for a particular plot point within the story. These interestingness values are based on real human players’ interactions with the story. We also present a drama manager that uses a search process (based on the expectimax algorithm) and combines the author specified aesthetic values with the player model.

Read the paper:

Towards Player Preference Modeling for Drama Management in Interactive Stories

by Manu Sharma, Santi Ontañón, Christina Strong, Manish Mehta, Ashwin Ram

20th International FLAIRS Conference on Artificial Intelligence (FLAIRS-07), Key West, FL, May 2007
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-07-03.pdf

8 May

Artificial Intelligence for Adaptive Computer Games

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Game AI, Learning, Talks. Tagged: , , , , .

Computer games are an increasingly popular application for Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, and conversely AI is an increasingly popular selling point for commercial games. Although games are typically associated with entertainment, there are many “serious” applications of gaming, including military, corporate, and advertising applications. There are also so-called “humane” gaming applications for medical training, educational games, and games that reflect social consciousness or advocate for a cause. Game AI is the effort of going beyond scripted interactions, however complex, into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Such systems learn about the player(s) during game play, adapt their own behaviors beyond the pre-programmed set provided by the game author, and interactively develop and provide a richer experience to the player(s).

The long-term goal of our research is to develop artificial intelligence techniques that can have a significant impact in the game industry. We present a list of challenges and research opportunities in developing techniques that can be used by computer game developers. We discuss three Case Based Reasoning (CBR) approaches to achieve adaptability in games: automatic behavior adaptation for believable characters; drama management and user modeling for interactive stories; and strategic behavior planning for real-time strategy games.

Read the paper:

Artificial Intelligence for Adaptive Computer Games

by Ashwin Ram, Santi Ontañón, Manish Mehta

Invited talk at the 20th International FLAIRS Conference on Artificial Intelligence (FLAIRS-07), Special Track on Case-Based Reasoning, Key West, FL, May 2007
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-07-04.pdf

8 May

Detecting Medical Rule Sentences with Semi-Automatically Derived Patterns: A Pilot Study

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Health & Wellness, Language, Learning. Tagged: , .

We propose a semi-supervised method to extract rule sentences from medical abstracts. Medical rules are sentences that give interesting and non-trivial relationship between medical entities. Mining such medical rules is important since the rules thus extracted can be used as inputs to an expert system or in many more other ways. The technique we suggest is based on paraphrasing a set of seed sentences and populating a pattern dictionary of paraphrases of rules. We match the patterns against the new abstract and rank the sentences.

Read the paper:

Detecting Medical Rule Sentences with Semi-Automatically Derived Patterns: A Pilot Study

by Shreekanth Karvaje, Bharat Ravisekar, Baoli Li, Ernie Garcia, Ashwin Ram

International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications ( ISBRA-07), Atlanta, GA, May 2007
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-07-07.pdf

1 May

Learning and Joint Deliberation through Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems

Posted by cognitivecomputing in Agents, Learning. Tagged: , .

We present an argumentation framework for learning agents (AMAL) designed for two purposes: (1) for joint deliberation, and (2) for learning from communication.  The AMAL framework is completely based on learning from examples: the argument preference relation, the argument generation policy, and the counterargument generation policy are case-based techniques.

For joint deliberation, learning agents share their experience by forming a committee to decide upon some joint decision. We experimentally show that the argumentation among committees of agents improves both the individual and joint performance. For learning from communication, an agent engages into arguing with other agents in order to contrast its individual hypotheses and receive counterexamples; the argumentation process improves their learning
scope and individual performance.

Read the paper:

Learning and Joint Deliberation through Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems

by Santi Ontañón and Enric Plaza

in Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2007), pp. 971-978
www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-07-19.pdf