CIS 700: Interactive Fiction and Text Generation

Course Description

We know now that artificial intelligence (AI) can play chess or even Go, but can AI play text adventure games (also known as interactive fiction)? What about roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons? In this course, we will be looking at the subfields of automated story generation (teaching computers to tell stories), interactive fiction (teaching computers to play through stories), and their intersection (teaching computers to tell and then play through the stories). This class will teach you about computational creativity and help develop your skills in natural language processing and cognitive modeling.

Learning Objectives

• Understanding the challenges of creating text-based games and automatically generating stories.
• Implement and appraise the value of different technologies (Neural Language Models, Dialogue Systems, Scripts
• Planning, and Commonsense Reasoning) in story generation/interactive fiction playing.
• Argue for the appropriate components of a working story generation system or interactive fiction–playing system.
• Create your own story generation system or interactive fiction–playing system.

Semesters Taught

Spring 2022