From Floorplan to Navigation Concepts: Automatic Generation of Text-based Games

Abstract. Text-based games are environments in which defining the world, the representation of the world to the player (hereafter, agent) and agent interactions with the environment are all through text. Text-based games expose abstract, executable representations of indoor spaces through verbally referenced concepts. Yet, the ability of text-based games to represent indoor environments of real-world complexity is currently limited due to insufficient support for complex space decomposition and space interaction concepts. This paper suggests a procedure to automate the mapping of real-world geometric floorplan information into text-based game environment concepts, using the Microsoft TextWorld game platform as a case. To capture the complexities of indoor spaces, we enrich existing TextWorld concepts supported by theoretical navigation concepts.We first decompose indoor spaces using skeletonization, and then identify formal space concepts and their relationships. We further enhance the spectrum of supported agent interactions with an extended grammar, including egocentric navigation instructions. We demonstrate and discuss these new capabilities in an evacuation scenario. Our implementation extends the capabilities of TextWorld to provide a research testbed for spatial research, including symbolic spatial modelling, interaction with indoor spaces, and agent-based machine learning and language processing tasks.