Modeling Mentor-Mentee Dialogues in Film

With a view to inform the design of a mentor-like synthetic agent that is to engage in a coherent and consistent in character conversation with human subjects, we conducted a data-driven analysis of verbal communication between fictional mentor and mentee characters in films. While in our earlier work the focus was on the conversation strategies of mentor characters, here we present the extended model, wherein conversation activity of both mentor and mentee characters is accounted for. To examine and to formalize local communication actions and extended goals that the two characters achieve jointly, categories of intents, projects and relationship phases were introduced. The resulting annotated corpus of mentor and mentee characters’ utterances was analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. In furtherance of the automated in-character dialogue generation task, a range of the state-of-the-art approaches to automated utterances classification was evaluated.