Schema-Guided Culture-Aware Complex Event Simulation with Multi-Agent Role-Play

TL;DR

This paper presents a controllable, culturally-aware complex event simulation framework that uses schemas and multi-agent role-play to generate coherent and contextually appropriate scenarios for better preparedness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel schema-guided, culture-aware simulation method with multi-agent role-play to improve realism and coherence in complex event modeling.

Findings

Simulations are more coherent and culturally appropriate.

Participants from humanitarian organizations favor the generated scenarios.

The approach effectively incorporates social norms and individual agent behaviors.

Abstract

Complex news events, such as natural disasters and socio-political conflicts, require swift responses from the government and society. Relying on historical events to project the future is insufficient as such events are sparse and do not cover all possible conditions and nuanced situations. Simulation of these complex events can help better prepare and reduce the negative impact. We develop a controllable complex news event simulator guided by both the event schema representing domain knowledge about the scenario and user-provided assumptions representing case-specific conditions. As event dynamics depend on the fine-grained social and cultural context, we further introduce a geo-diverse commonsense and cultural norm-aware knowledge enhancement component. To enhance the coherence of the simulation, apart from the global timeline of events, we take an agent-based approach to simulate the individual character states, plans, and actions. By incorporating the schema and cultural norms, our generated simulations achieve much higher coherence and appropriateness and are received favorably by participants from a humanitarian assistance organization.