Fine-tuning GPT-2 on annotated RPG quests for NPC dialogue generation

GPT-2, a neural language model trained on a large dataset of English web text, has been used in a variety of natural language generation tasks because of the language quality and coherence of its outputs. In order to investigate the usability of GPT-2 for text generation for video games, we fine-tuned GPT-2 on a corpus of video game quests and used this model to generate dialogue lines for quest-giver NPCs in a role-playing game. We show that the model learned the structure of quests and NPC dialogue, and investigate how the temperature parameter influences the language quality and creativity of the output artifacts. We evaluated our approach with a crowdsource experiment in which human judges were asked to rate hand-written and generated quest texts on language quality, coherence and creativity.