Stylistic Variation in Television Dialogue for Natural Language Generation

Grace Lin, Marilyn Walker


Abstract
Conversation is a critical component of storytelling, where key information is often revealed by what/how a character says it. We focus on the issue of character voice and build stylistic models with linguistic features related to natural language generation decisions. Using a dialogue corpus of the television series, The Big Bang Theory, we apply content analysis to extract relevant linguistic features to build character-based stylistic models, and we test the model-fit through an user perceptual experiment with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The results are encouraging in that human subjects tend to perceive the generated utterances as being more similar to the character they are modeled on, than to another random character.
Anthology ID:
W17-4911
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Julian Brooke, Thamar Solorio, Moshe Koppel
Venue:
Style-Var
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
85–93
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4911
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-4911
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Grace Lin and Marilyn Walker. 2017. Stylistic Variation in Television Dialogue for Natural Language Generation. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation, pages 85–93, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Stylistic Variation in Television Dialogue for Natural Language Generation (Lin & Walker, Style-Var 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-4911.pdf