Publications

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Refereed Journal Articles

• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Large Language Models as narrative planning search guides. IEEE Transactions on Games, vol. 17, num. 2, pp. 419-428, 2024.
• Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware, Lewis J. Baker. Personality and emotion in strong-story narrative planning. IEEE Transactions on Games, vol. 15, num. 4, pp. 669-682, 2023.
• Stephen G. Ware, Edward T. Garcia, Mira Fisher, Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell. Multi-agent narrative experience management as story graph pruning. IEEE Transactions on Games, vol. 15, num. 3, pp. 378-387, 2022.
• Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware. Solution density and search strategy in narrative generation. IEEE Transactions on Games, vol. 14, num. 4, pp. 715-724, 2022.
• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware, Lewis J. Baker. Manipulating narrative salience in interactive stories using Indexter's Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis. IEEE Transactions on Games, vol. 12, num. 1, pp. 74-85, 2020.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young. Intentionality and conflict in The Best Laid Plans interactive narrative virtual environment. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games, vol. 8, num. 4, pp. 402-411, 2015.
• Brent Harrison, Stephen G. Ware, Matthew William Fendt, David L. Roberts. A survey and analysis of techniques for player behavior prediction in Massively Multiplayer Online games. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing Special Issue on MMO Technologies, vol. 3, num. 2, pp. 260-274, 2014.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, Brent Harrison, David L. Roberts. A computational model of narrative conflict at the fabula level. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games, vol. 6, num. 3, pp. 271-288, 2014.
• R. Michael Young, Stephen G. Ware, Bradly A. Cassell, Justus Robertson. Plans and planning in narrative generation: a review of plan-based approaches to the generation of story, discourse and interactivity in narratives. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung, Special Issue on Formal and Computational Models of Narrative, vol. 37, num. 1-2, pp. 41-64, 2013.

Refereed Conference Papers

• Lasantha Senanayake, Stephen G. Ware. Speeding up narrative planning using Fog of War Pruning. In Proceedings of the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 121-131, 2025. Awarded Best Paper.
• Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware. An answer set encoding for narrative planning with Theory of Mind. In Proceedings of the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 132-141, 2025.
• Fairoz Nower Khan, Nabuat Zaman Nahim, Stephen G. Ware, Judy Goldsmith. Detecting duplicate states is worth it in narrative planning with belief. In Proceedings of the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 62-69, 2025.
• Molly Siler, Mira Fisher, Stephen G. Ware. Pareto-based narrative planning: making NPCs more rational. In Proceedings of the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 337-346, 2025. (full paper presented as poster)
• Mira Fisher, Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware. Structure, agency, and improvisation in human-led digital interactive narrative exercises. In Proceedings of the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 237-246, 2025. (full paper presented as poster)
• Gage Birchmeier, Stephen G. Ware. Speeding up narrative planning with Causal Width Search and Pruning. In Proceedings of the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 196-205, 2025. (full paper presented as poster)
• Lasantha Senanayake, Stephen G. Ware. Language models as narrative planning heuristics. In Proceedings of the 20th international conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2025. Awarded Best Paper.
• Mira Fisher, Stephen G. Ware. A model for automating the abstraction of planning problems in a narrative context. In Proceedings of the 20th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 35-45, 2024. Awarded Best Student Paper.
• Stephen G. Ware, Lasantha Senanayake, Rachelyn Farrell. Causal necessity as a narrative planning step cost function. In Proceedings of the 19th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 155-164, 2023.
• Rachelyn Farrell, Mira Fisher, Stephen G. Ware. Salience vectors for measuring distance between stories. In Proceedings of the 18th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 95-104, 2022.
• Stephen G. Ware, Rachelyn Farrell. Salience as a narrative planning step cost function. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Games, pp. 433-440, 2022.
• Stephen G. Ware, Molly Siler. Sabre: a narrative planner supporting intention and deep theory of mind. In Proceedings of the 17th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 99-106, 2021. Awarded nomination for Best Paper.
• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Narrative planning for belief and intention recognition. In Proceedings of the 16th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 52-58, 2020.
• Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware. A good story is one in a million: solution density in narrative generation problems. In Proceedings of the 16th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 123-129, 2020. Awarded nomination for Best Student Paper.
• Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware. A formalization of emotional planning for strong-story systems. In Proceedings of the 16th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 116-122, 2020.
• Stephen G. Ware, Edward T. Garcia, Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell. Multi-agent narrative experience management as story graph pruning. In Proceedings of the 15th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 87-93, 2019.
• Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware. A plan-based personality model for story characters. In Proceedings of the 15th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 188-194, 2019.
• Edward T. Garcia, Stephen G. Ware, Lewis J. Baker. Measuring presence and performance in an intelligent virtual reality police use of force training simulation prototype. In Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society conference, pp. 276-281, 2019.
• Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Combining intentionality and belief: revisiting believable character plans. In Proceedings of the 14th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 222-228, 2018. (full paper presented as poster)
• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Influencing user choices in interactive narratives using Indexter's Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis. In Proceedings of the 13th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 37-42, 2017.
• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Causal link semantics for narrative planning using numeric fluents. In Proceedings of the 13th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 193-199, 2017. (full paper presented as poster)
• Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware, Rachelyn Farrell. A possible worlds model of belief for state-space narrative planning. In Proceedings of the 13th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 101-107, 2017.
• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Predicting user choices in interactive narratives using Indexter's Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, pp. 147-155, 2016.
• Rachelyn Farrell, Scott Robertson, Stephen G. Ware. Asking hypothetical questions about stories using QUEST. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, pp. 136-146, 2016.
• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Fast and diverse narrative planning through novelty pruning. In Proceedings of the 12th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 37-43, 2016.
• Christopher Kives, Stephen G. Ware, Lewis J. Baker. Evaluating the Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis in Indexter. In Proceedings of the 11th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 30-36, 2015.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young. Glaive: a state-space narrative planner supporting intentionality and conflict. In Proceedings of the 10th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 80-86, 2014. Awarded Best Student Paper.
• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Justus Robertson, Stephen G. Ware, Brent Harrison, David L. Roberts, R. Michael Young. Foreseeing meaningful choices. In Proceedings of the 10th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 9-15, 2014.
• Matthew William Fendt, Brent Harrison, Stephen G. Ware, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, David L. Roberts. Achieving the illusion of agency. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, pp. 114-125, 2012. Awarded Best Paper.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, Brent Harrison, David L. Roberts. Four quantitative metrics describing narrative conflict. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, pp. 18-29, 2012.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young. Validating a plan-based model of narrative conflict. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 220-227, 2012.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young. CPOCL: a narrative planner supporting conflict. In Proceedings of the 7th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 97-102, 2011.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young. Modeling narrative conflict to generate interesting stories. In Proceedings of the 6th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 210-215, 2010. (full paper presented as poster)

Refereed Workshop and Symposium Papers

• Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware, Gage Birchmeier, Mira Fisher, Lasantha Senanayake. Designing a modular, scalable benchmark for narrative experience management. In Proceedings of the joint workshop on Experimental AI in Games and Intelligent Narrative Technologies at the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2025.
• Gage Birchmeier. Towards a model of uncertainty in narrative planning. In Doctoral Consortium at the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 412-414, 2025.
• Lasantha Senanayake. From emergence to planning: a triangle framework for scalable, controllable interactive storytelling. In Doctoral Consortium at the 21st AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 450-453, 2025.
• Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware. Structure, agency, and intent: preliminary data collection. In Proceedings of the Interactive Narrative Technologies workshop at the 20th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2024.
• Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware. Knowledge goal recognition for interactive narratives. In Proceedings of the Experimental AI in Games workshop at the 19th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2023.
• Mira Fisher, Molly Siler, Stephen G. Ware. Intelligent de-escalation training via emotion-inspired narrative planning. In Proceedings of the 13th Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop at the 18th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2022.
• Mira Fisher. Narrative planning in large domains through state abstraction and option discovery. In Doctoral Consortium at the 18th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 299-302, 2022.
• Molly Siler. Open-world narrative generation to answer players' questions. In Doctoral Consortium at the 18th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 307-310, 2022.
• Stephen G. Ware, Mira Fisher. Exploring regression-based narrative planning. In Proceedings of the 12th Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop at the 16th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2020.
• Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware. Camelot: a modular customizable sandbox for visualizing interactive narratives. In Proceedings of the 12th Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop at the 16th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2020.
• Alireza Shirvani, Stephen G. Ware. On automatically motivating story characters. In Proceedings of the Experimental AI in Games workshop at the 15th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2019.
• Alireza Shirvani. Towards more believable characters using personality and emotion. In Doctoral Consortium at the 15th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 230-232, 2019.
• Rachelyn Farrell. Experience management with beliefs, desires, and intentions for virtual agents. In Doctoral Consortium at the 14th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 290-292, 2018.
• Stephen G. Ware. Mutual Implicit Question Answering for shared authorship: a pilot study on player expectations. In Proceedings of the 10th Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop at the 13th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 259-265, 2017.
• Stephen G. Ware. The Intentional Fast-Forward narrative planner. In Proceedings of the 5th Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop at the 8th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 57-62, 2012.
• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Bradley A. Cassell, Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young. Indexter: a computational model of the Event-Indexing Situation Model for characterizing narratives. In Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, pp. 34-43, 2012. Awarded Best Student Paper on a Cognitive Science Topic.
• Stephen G. Ware, Brent Harrison, R. Michael Young, David L. Roberts. Initial results for measuring four dimensions of narrative conflict. In Proceedings of the 4th Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop at the 7th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 115-122, 2011.
• Stephen G. Ware. A computational model of narrative conflict. In Doctoral Consortium at the 6th international conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 247-249, 2011.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young. Rethinking traditional planning assumptions to facilitate narrative generation. In Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Models of Narrative, pp. 71-72, 2010.

Refereed Posters and Extended Abstracts

• Stephen G. Ware, Molly Siler. The Sabre narrative planner: multi-agent coordination with intentions and beliefs. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 1698-1700, 2021.

e-Prints

• Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen G. Ware. Planning stories neurally. 2024.

Refereed Book Chapters

• Stephen G. Ware. An introduction to Graph Theory. In Practical Graph Mining with R, Eds. Nagiza F. Samatova, William Hendrix, John Jenkins, Kanchana Padmanabhan, Arpan Chakraborty, pp. 9-26, 2013. CRC Press.
• Brent Harrison, Jason Smith, Stephen G. Ware. Frequent Subgraph Mining. In Practical Graph Mining with R, Eds. Nagiza F. Samatova, William Hendrix, John Jenkins, Kanchana Padmanabhan, Arpan Chakraborty, pp. 181-221, 2013. CRC Press.

Refereed Demonstrations

• Ben Samuel, Aaron Reed, Emily Short, Samantha Heck, Barrie Robison, Landon Wright, Terence Soule, Mike Treanor, Joshua McCoy, Anne Sullivan, Alireza Shirvani, Edward T. Garcia, Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen Ware, Katherine Compton. Playable experiences at AIIDE 2018. In Proceedings of the 14th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 275-280, 2018.
• Nathan R. Sturtevant, Jeff Orkin, Robert Zubek, Michael Cook, Stephen G. Ware, Christian Stith, R. Michael Young, Phillip Wright, Squirrel Eiserloh, Alejandro Ramirez-Sanabria, Vadim Bulitko, Kieran Lord. Playable experiences at AIIDE 2014. In Proceedings of the 10th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, pp. 203-209, 2014.

Demonstrations

• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, Christian Stith, Phillip Wright. Interactive narrative planning in The Best Laid Plans. In Proceedings of the 25th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Agent Demonstrations, pp. 4313-4314, 2015.

Theses and Dissertations

• Rachelyn Farrell. Don't give me that story!--a human-centered framework for usable narrative planning. Ph.D. thesis at University of Kentucky, 2022.
• Alireza Shirvani. Personality and emotion for virtual characters in strong-story narrative planning. Ph.D. thesis at University of Kentucky, 2021.
• Edward T. Garcia. Multi-agent narrative experience management as story graph pruning. M.S. thesis at University of New Orleans, 2019.
• Dustin P. Peabody. Detecting Metagame Shifts in League of Legends Using Unsupervised Learning. M.S. thesis at University of New Orleans, 2018.
• Rachelyn Farrell. Predicting user choices in interactive narratives using Indexter's pairwise event salience hypothesis. M.S. thesis at University of New Orleans, 2017.
• Dharmesh Rajendra Desai. Measuring presence in a police use of force simulation. M.S. thesis at University of New Orleans, 2017.
• Ted Mader. Integrating virtual reality with use-of-force training simulations. Bachelor's Thesis at University of New Orleans, 2017.
• Stephen G. Ware. A plan-based model of conflict for narrative reasoning and generation. Ph.D. thesis at North Carolina State University, 2014.
• Stephen G. Ware. Toward a computational model of narrative conflict. M.S. thesis at North Carolina State University, 2011.

Technical Reports

• Stephen G. Ware, Rachelyn Farrell. A Collection of Benchmark Problems for the Sabre Narrative Planner. Narrative Intelligence Lab, 2023.

Software

• Stephen G. Ware. The Sabre narrative planner. https://github.com/sgware/sabre, 2023.
• Stephen G. Ware. The Glaive narrative planner. https://nil.cs.uno.edu/projects/glaive/, 2014.
• Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, Christian Stith, Phillip Wright. The Best Laid Plans. http://cs.uky.edu/~sgware/projects/blp/, 2014.

Miscellaneous

• Stephen G. Ware, Rushit Sanghrajka. Workshop Report: Intelligent Narrative Technologies: The 16th AAAI conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. In Interactive AI Magazine, 2021.
• Oliver Gown, Arne Eigenfeldt, Rania Hodhod, Philippe Pasquier, Reid Swanson, Stephen G. Ware, Jichen Zhu. Reports on the 2012 AIIDE Workshops. AI Magazine, vol. 34, num. 1, pp. 90-92, 2012.
• Stephen G. Ware. Crossed swords and broken hearts: a computational model of narrative conflict. Poster at the North Carolina State University Graduate Research Symposium, 2012.