These notes are a summary of concepts presented in “Personality-rich believable agents that use language.”
A. Bryan Loyall and Joseph Bates. 1997. Personality-rich believable agents that use language. In Proceedings of the first international conference on Autonomous agents (AGENTS ’97). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 106–113. https://doi.org/10.1145/267658.267681
- Core Characteristics
- Believable agents
- Autonomous agents with rich, specific personalities akin to characters in movies or animations
- Integration of text generation with action, perception, inference, and emotion
- Suspension of disbelief, creating a sense of reality for the viewer or user
- Believable agents
- Communication and Expression
- Use of language and action together for communication goals
- Linguistic variation based on emotional state and personality
- Real-time delivery of language with naturalistic elements like pauses and restarts
- Artistic Abstraction and Detail
- Focus on essential traits for believability through abstraction
- Importance of fine details (e.g., eye use, speech pauses, body awareness)
- Parallel and Incremental Behavior
- Language generation occurs alongside other independent goals
- Streams of control signals to multiple channels (e.g., eyes, body, voice)
- Responsiveness to real-time events in the world
- Role of Emotion and Perception
- Emotion linked to the success/failure of communication and other actions
- Perception used to influence linguistic choices
- Behavior-Based Programming
- Programs as collections of behaviors with goals, parameters, bodies, and preconditions
- Hierarchical goal structures enabling parallel threads of action
- Multiple top-level goals, reactivity, and backtracking mechanisms
- Components and Functions
- Functions supporting emotion, social behavior, and memory inherit reactivity and parallelism
- Hierarchical decomposition for structured concept generation
- Groups and Features Representation
- Groups as roles with collections of features (name/value pairs)
- Ease of creation and access to components
- Central subgroup or feature (projector) guides group generation
- Processing and Communication
- Combination rules for recent string generation
- Communication between subgoals via parameter passing or dynamic variables
- Dynamic scoping enables parallel behaviors to share information
- Inference and Context Sensitivity
- Inference rules evaluated during goal pursuit
- Sensor queries for real-time world interaction during active behaviors
- Contextual annotations for adaptive behavior adjustments
- Real-Time Responsiveness
- Flow rules ensure smooth information flow but must avoid excessive delays
- Parallel behaviors react to real-time changes effectively