Narrative-Driven Travel Planning: Geoculturally-Grounded Script Generation with Evolutionary Itinerary Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces NarrativeGuide, a novel framework that generates culturally-grounded travel narratives and optimizes itineraries using genetic algorithms to enhance tourist immersion and experience.

Contribution

It presents a new approach combining knowledge graphs, narrative script generation, and evolutionary optimization for personalized, culturally-aware travel planning.

Findings

Effective itinerary optimization with genetic algorithms.

High coherence and cultural relevance in generated narratives.

Strong performance demonstrated on the TravelPlanner benchmark.

Abstract

To enhance tourists' experiences and immersion, this paper proposes a narrative-driven travel planning framework called NarrativeGuide, which generates a geoculturally-grounded narrative script for travelers, offering a novel, role-playing experience for their journey. In the initial stage, NarrativeGuide constructs a knowledge graph for attractions within a city, then configures the worldview, character setting, and exposition based on the knowledge graph. Using this foundation, the knowledge graph is combined to generate an independent scene unit for each attraction. During the itinerary planning stage, NarrativeGuide models narrative-driven travel planning as an optimization problem, utilizing a genetic algorithm (GA) to refine the itinerary. Before evaluating the candidate itinerary, transition scripts are generated for each pair of adjacent attractions, which, along with the scene units, form a complete script. The weighted sum of script coherence, travel time, and attraction scores is then used as the fitness value to update the candidate solution set. In our experiments, we incorporated the TravelPlanner benchmark to systematically evaluate the planning capability of NarrativeGuide under complex constraints. In addition, we assessed its performance in terms of narrative coherence and cultural fit. The results show that NarrativeGuide demonstrates strong capabilities in both itinerary planning and script generation.