ACL 2025 | Bringing Novel Characters to Life! Fudan BookWorld Creates Immersive Novel World Simulation System}
Fudan University’s BookWorld system uses AI to animate novel characters, creating an immersive virtual universe for storytelling, interaction, and endless creative possibilities.
Editor | Bai Cai Ye
Fudan University’s Yiting Ran and Xintao Wang led the development of BookWorld, guided by teachers Yang Deqing and Xiao Yanghua. The Knowledge Workshop Lab at Fudan has long focused on personification and role-playing in large language models, publishing multiple top conference papers and a comprehensive review in this field.
Imagine creating an AI-driven universe based on classics like Dream of the Red Chamber or Game of Thrones. Characters become AI entities living in BookWorld, waking up daily, thinking, conversing, interacting, and forming relationships.
If they could live freely, beyond the control of authors, would the story change? Could a parallel universe see Baoyu and Daiyu sharing a beautiful love story?
This ACL 2025 paper — BookWorld: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Creative Story Generation — explores how to make novel characters truly 'live' and build an immersive virtual world.
In BookWorld, the authors propose a system that extracts character and worldview data from novels to construct an AI universe where characters interact, evolve, and generate stories independently. The system models character AI, world AI, spatial relationships, and worldview construction, supporting user interventions to guide story development.
- Paper Title: BookWorld: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Creative Story Generation
- Homepage: https://bookworld2025.github.io/
BookWorld innovatively constructs multi-agent societies based on novels, allowing characters to interact, grow, and create stories autonomously. It faithfully restores the original worldview and enables characters to perform freely in the virtual universe, generating new story chapters.
Research Background: The Dilemma of Novel Worlds
Traditional novel creation is limited by the author's imagination; once the story ends, characters are 'sealed' within pages. Existing AI systems can generate text and simulate social interactions but lack deep understanding and restoration of the original novel universe.
BookWorld’s breakthrough lies in extracting character features, worldview settings, and background knowledge from original novels to build a complete virtual society. Each character has memory, status, and goals, capable of working, communicating, and trading like real individuals.
Core Method: BookWorld Framework
The system comprises character agents and world agents. Characters embody novel roles, while the world agent manages overall system operation, maintains global state, and provides environmental feedback. Scenes serve as the smallest narrative units, like chapters, maintaining independence yet forming a complete story.
The system supports two modes: autonomous and intervention. In autonomous mode, characters pursue goals based on initial global events (e.g., 'A war has broken out'), acting accordingly. In intervention mode, users can control story development via scripts or prompts. The system also models spatial constraints and travel times, enhancing immersion.
Data Preparation: Making the Virtual World Realistic
To enhance realism, BookWorld extracts setting data from 16 Chinese and English novels using an innovative terminology-based extraction method. Each setting includes four key elements: term (e.g., 'invisible cloak'), type (e.g., 'artifact', 'spell'), details, and source chapter. This method extracted 9,142 settings, providing a solid foundation for immersive virtual worlds.
Simulation Process: Natural Story Development
BookWorld advances scene by scene, like acts in a play. Before each scene, characters are selected to be in the same location, ensuring focused interactions. Characters can converse, interact with the environment, or observe. The world agent dynamically determines actions based on current info and character states, making story progression natural and smooth.
Experimental Results
Extensive experiments demonstrate BookWorld’s remarkable creativity. It maintains fidelity to original works while generating high-quality new stories, surpassing existing methods in 75.36% of cases. The system excels in personification, character fidelity, immersion, scene quality, writing, and story coherence.
Future Outlook
BookWorld is not only a tool for novel creation but also an interactive entertainment platform. Authors can explore different endings, and readers can 'enter' the story, becoming part of the plot. Future updates will support more complex settings and open up more 'parallel storylines,' allowing each user to create their own universe.