Raconteur : intelligent assistance for conversational storytelling with media libraries

People who are not professional storytellers sometimes have difficulty putting together a coherent and engaging story, even when it is about their own experiences. However, consider putting the same person in a conversation with a sympathetic, interested and questioning listener, suddenly the story comes alive. There's something about the situation of being in a conversation that encourages people to stay on topic, make coherent points, and make the story interesting for a listener. Raconteur is a system for conversational storytelling between a storyteller and a viewer. It provides intelligent assistance in illustrating a life story with photos and videos from a personal media library. Raconteur performs natural language processing on a text chat between two users and recommends appropriate media items from the annotated library, each file with one or a few sentences in unrestricted English. A large commonsense knowledge base and a novel commonsense inference technique are used to understand event relations and determine narration similarity using concept vector computation that goes beyond keyword matching or word co-occurrence based techniques. Furthermore, by identifying larger scale story patterns such as problem and resolution or expectation violation, it assists users in continuing the chatted story coherently. A small user study shows that people find Raconteur's suggestions helpful in real-time storytelling and its interaction design engaging to explore stories together.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Chi, Pei-Yu, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Henry Lieberman.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/61944

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/61944