Schema-Guided Culture-Aware Complex Event Simulation with Multi-Agent Role-Play (2024)

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.

## introduction history repeats itself, sometimes in a bad way, underscoring the importance of recognizing patterns and taking proactive measures to mitigate or ideally eliminate potential natural or man-made disasters. the necessity of this approach is evident in the context of emerging crises such as the covid-19 pandemic and the ukraine crisis. addressing these situations effectively demands a comprehensive, time-sensitive understanding to inform appropriate decision-making and prompt responses @xcite . these pressing situations highlight the need for advanced tools capable of scenario simulation to provide predictive insights and facilitate preemptive planning, thereby enhancing preparedness and response strategies. in developing such a simulator, we define several desiderata: (1) the simulator should be controllable, allowing the user to manage and set the conditions under which the simulation will occur; in this context, we introduce miriam, a novel news event simulator designed to function as an intelligent prophetess. by leveraging "what-if" conditions and assumptions provided by domain experts regarding disaster scenarios, miriam generates a complex event simulation that describes future events with character-centric narratives, while catering to the geo-cultural diversity inherent in the scenario assumptions. effectively, our event simulator system that has the following characteristics: figure 1 shows an overview of miriam, our proposed system for complex event simulation. by effectively simulating disaster scenarios in both event graph and natural language formats, miriam aims to assist humanitarian workers and policymakers in conducting reality checks, ultimately aiding in the prevention and management of future disasters. neural story generation: due to the complex nature of story generation, controllable story generation has been proposed to address the causality of story events. existing story generation mainly focuses on two aspects @xcite : story planning and character modeling. previous improvements for story planning can be divided into several categories: keywords planning @xcite , coarse-tofine planning @xcite , commonsense reasoner @xcite , event graphs @xcite @xcite , and interper-sonal relationships @xcite . in contrast, we generate stories in a two-level way, conditioned on event schemas, user-provided assumptions, and commonsense norms. our work also relates to character modeling in story generation @xcite . however, instead of generating character descriptions based on existing stories @xcite , we generate character profiles dynamically based on existing events and event schemas. furthermore, we assign each character as a language agent to simulate his/her interactions with the scenario. ## experiments our experiments aim to investigate the impact of various components integrated into our system, alongside assessing the overall utility of the tool. first, §4.1 outlines the automatic evaluations to determine the benefit of leveraging the event schemas and cultural norms in simulation generation. then, §4.2 studies the perceived utility of our tool, based on feedback from participants affiliated with a humanitarian assistance organization. the gpt-4o mini model serves as the underlying llm in the simulation generation process. ## conclusion we introduce miriam, a controllable complex news event simulator designed to improve preparation and response to events like natural disasters and socio-political conflicts. using event schemas for domain knowledge and incorporating user assumptions, miriam offers global control over event dynamics. it enhances realism by integrating geodiverse commonsense and cultural norm awareness. the system generates a coherent global timeline and employs a large language model to simulate the states, plans, and actions of individual agents, enabling detailed and realistic character-based stories. this agent-based approach outperforms traditional schema-only methods, providing a valuable tool for training, preparedness, and societal resilience. unwind at home: despite the ongoing outbreak in jakarta, andi pratama decided to go for a morning jog in the park, taking extra precautions to avoid crowded areas and maintain personal hygiene. unwind at home: during a disease outbreak in jakarta, andi pratama, a devout muslim, performed the tahajjud prayer at night in his apartment. as the new year began, he prayed earnestly for his community's wellbeing. in the morning, after performing fajr prayer at home, andi pratama jogged in a nearby park, embracing the "gotong royong" spirit by carefully avoiding crowded areas and keeping distance from others.