Are these stories?

In informal pilot exercises we found that the overwhelming majority of presentations based on stories generated using the story-morphing process were seen as plausible, whereas those presentations generated without theory-based morphing were seen as implausible, and often nonsensical. Over time, certain minimal constraints were developed in choosing both the base stories and the types of interpretations on the parts of the characters that were used as the basis for morphing.

The data presented in this paper was based on two story-morphs randomly chosen from a collection of more than 300 variations based on a single base plot sequence. In all cases the spoken dialog remained the same. Emotions were automatically scripted for the computer agents, based on appraisals of the action sequence according to different sets of selected goals, principles, preferences, and emotion intensity-relevant values (e.g., the tags and their variations). These emotions were then expressed during a presentation of the script by the multimedia Affective Reasoner agents, using minimally-inflected spoken dialog, music, and facial expressions.

The first question we wanted to answer was whether or not the story-morphs presented were seen as cohesive, sensible narratives, or as implausible. Coders were given the following question to assess for each of the subjects:

Which of the following is true for this respondent?

• (s) There were indications in the responses that the test subject had some cohesive story in mind that was not explicitly stated in the spoken text.
• (i) The subject made some interpretive inferences, but did not seem to have a cohesive story in mind.
• (f) The subject reported only information that was present in the spoken text, displays, or music, and did not make any inferences.

Three coders were used to interpret the free-form responses. The coders worked closely together on consistently evaluating the data with respect to the three labeling choices.

As predicted, it was clear that choice (f) did not apply to any of the response sheets. The remaining distinction between (s) and (i) had to be handled carefully. Unless some explicit indication was present that inferences made by the subject were linked together (e.g., drawn from some projected story) the response was coded as (i). For example the coders agreed that one subject made many inferences, but did not make any that conclusively came from some internal narrative. Each of the subject's inferences could be made, ad hoc, from disconnected impressions of the presentation. Along with other inferences, the subject reported that Elliot might, ``be very upset, have a nicer personality than Rick, have facial expressions that did not reflect his inner feelings,'' and, ``defend his personality with comments like, `I won't do it.' '' While significant inferences were made (and this is only a partial list), there is nothing explicit to suggest cohesion between the inferences, and hence the reponse was coded as (i).

We found:

• In 83% of the cases there was agreement that the subject had an internal narrative representation on which inferences were based. (s)
• In 13% of the cases there was agreement that the responses showed inferences but that the infrencences were not necessarily representitive of a cohesive story (i)
• In none of the cases did the subjects fail to make inferences beyond that which was explicitly present in the text, music, or in the facial displays.
• In 4% of the cases the coding was inconclusive, although with a bias toward the responses showing there was an internal narrative representation.

Additionally, on the response sheet, along with the free-form response, we asked subjects to rate the quality of each of the stories presented. They were given the following scale:

   
      Could never |   Might   |  Seems    |   Makes   
         happen   |  happen   | plausible |   sense   
                  |           |           |          
          1   2   |   3   4   |  5    6   |   7   8

Our preliminary data show that on the average subjects evaluated the stories in the interval 6 to 8. This result is confirmed by the t-test (N = 72, t = 0.028). Furthermore, responses in the 1 - 2 range, which would suggest that the story had enough flaws to threaten believability, were statistically insignificant.

The evidence seems clear that subjects formed internal, highly plausible, narratives based on inferences not explicitly stated in the presentations. This is consistent with, but goes beyond, the idea that computer users tend to anthropomorphize computer displays. In the case of play-acting Affective Reasoner agents they appear inclined to make projections about social interaction between the agents as well.