This paper explores character-driven story continuation, in which the story emerges through characters' first- and second-person narration as well as dialogue -- requiring models to select language that is consistent with a character's persona and their relationships with other characters while following and advancing the story. We hypothesize that a multi-task model that trains on character dialogue plus character relationship information improves transformer-based story continuation. To this end, we extend the Critical Role Dungeons and Dragons Dataset (Rameshkumar and Bailey, 2020) -- consisting of dialogue transcripts of people collaboratively telling a story while playing the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons -- with automatically extracted relationships between each pair of interacting characters as well as their personas. A series of ablations lend evidence to our hypothesis, showing that our multi-task model using character relationships improves story continuation accuracy over strong baselines.

We have a trust issue. In our digital world, it has become increasingly difficult to trust each other. Whether it is another person, an organisation or a device, trust is no longer a given online. This is a serious problem for our society and our democracy. If trust is lacking in society, anarchy can be expected.

LifeJourney International has launched its Day of STEM initiative, aiming to show students what it actually means to have a career in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), with the backing of some of the country's tech heavyweights. The program, Australia 2020, aims to push students towards a STEM-based career, but operates under the assumption that telling students to study STEM is not enough to incite interest. The online platform allows kids to explore what it is like to have a career in fields such as wireless technology, cybersecurity, drone delivery, financial services, and autonomous vehicles, with students mentored by Ian Hill, chief innovation officer at Westpac; Simone Bachmann, digital trust specialist, responsible for cyber innovation and culture at Australia Post; Gerard Tracey, wireless telecommunications expert at Telstra; Anastasia Cammaroto, CIO at BT Financial Group; Celeste Lowe, cyber risk director at Deloitte; Ita Farhat, chief of staff at AMP; Cara Walsh, digital experience expert from Queensland's RACQ; Martin Levins, consultant at Australian Council for Computers in Education; and others. The program is also backed by the likes of Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, and the Australian Computer Society, as well as an education advisory board to ensure the content stays relevant to the Australian market. A Day in STEM is pushed out to teachers and run in the classroom, with 95,000 students already signed up to the program ahead of its September 5 launch.