Murder in the Arboretum: Comparing Character Models to Personality Models

Interactive Narrative often involves dialogue with vir-tual dramatic characters. In this paper we compare two kinds of models of character style: one based on mod-els derived from the Big Five theory personality, and the other derived from a corpus-based method applied to characters and films from the IMSDb archive. We apply these models to character utterances for a pilot narrative-based outdoor augmented reality game called Murder in the Arboretum. We use an objective quantita-tive metric to estimate the quality of a character model, with the aim of predicting model quality without per-ceptual experiments. We show that corpus-based char-acter models derived from individual characters are of-ten more detailed and specific than personality based models, but that there is a strong correlation between personality judgments of original character dialogue and personality judgments of utterances generated for Murder in the Arboretum that use the derived character models