Conversational agents in a virtual world

This paper presents a system that builds on theoretical and experimental insights from linguistic pragmatics, uses novel techniques from computational linguistics and combines them with robust baseline technologies to provide intelligent Non Player Characters (NPCs), which naturally act and talk in a virtual world. Current NPCs still lack the necessary linguistic knowledge and methods to apply them to the numerous conversational application areas in virtual worlds. The system presented in this paper manages two NPCs, a barkeeper and a furniture sales agent, which highly depend on conversational abilities.