DREAMT -- Embodied Motivational Conversational Storytelling

Abstract: Storytelling is fundamental to language, including culture, conversation and communication in their broadest senses. It thus emerges as an essential component of intelligent systems, including systems where natural language is not a primary focus or where we do not usually think of a story being involved. In this paper we explore the emergence of storytelling as a requirement in embodied conversational agents, including its role in educational and health interventions, as well as in a general-purpose computer interface for people with disabilities or other constraints that prevent the use of traditional keyboard and speech interfaces. We further present a characterization of storytelling as an inventive fleshing out of detail according to a particular personal perspective, and propose the DREAMT model to focus attention on the different layers that need to be present in a character-driven storytelling system. Most if not all aspects of the DREAMT model have arisen from or been explored in some aspect of our implemented research systems, but currently only at a primitive and relatively unintegrated level. However, this experience leads us to formalize and elaborate the DREAMT model mnemonically as follows: - Description/Dialogue/Definition/Denotation - Realization/Representation/Role - Explanation/Education/Entertainment - Actualization/Activation - Motivation/Modelling - Topicalization/Transformation