Using Expressive Language Generation to Increase Authorial Leverage

It is widely agreed that the interaction possibilities in interactive narrative are limited by the current approach to dialog creation, which typically relies on teams of scriptwriters. This paper reports on experiments testing whether authorial leverage can be increased by methods for natural language generation of dialog in a story world called Heart of Shadows. Our experiments show that (1) expert writers spend less time authoring dialogue variations by editing automatically generated content than creating it from scratch and (2) expert writers are more critical of automatically generated dialogue than amateur writers.