The TaleMaker database of mixed-initiative co-created stories

Abstract

Several datasets of stories and text have been proven useful for a variety of research fields. Yet, many of these datasets have suffered from the burden of being manually authored and/or annotated, affecting their size and potential to grow. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel database of stories collected from TaleMaker, an online multiplayer game that facilitates the playful co-creation of a story in order to eliminate the tedious task of authoring and annotating a dataset of stories. TaleMaker's database relational schema provides a simple story representation, in which stories are named and clearly annotated. A story is composed of a sequence of plot points, each with several slots (e.g. action, character, location) filled with sense-annotated tokens (words) associated with a WordNet synset. In this paper, we describe in detail the database schema of TaleMaker's stories repository. In addition, we suggest some of the potential applications of this repository of stories, including fostering research in fields such as story generation, narrative world generation, and word sense disambiguation.