mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

A Systematic Survey of Text Worlds as Embodied Natural Language Environments

arXiv 2107.04132 ↗First posted 8 Jul 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 17

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Abstract (arXiv)

Text Worlds are virtual environments for embodied agents that, unlike 2D or 3D environments, are rendered exclusively using textual descriptions. These environments offer an alternative to higher-fidelity 3D environments due to their low barrier to entry, providing the ability to study semantics, compositional inference, and other high-level tasks with rich high-level action spaces while controlling for perceptual input. This systematic survey outlines recent developments in tooling, environments, and agent modeling for Text Worlds, while examining recent trends in knowledge graphs, common sense reasoning, transfer learning of Text World performance to higher-fidelity environments, as well as near-term development targets that, once achieved, make Text Worlds an attractive general research paradigm for natural language processing.

Key facts. Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 74 of its 106 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2021.

Builds on

74 of 106 references.

References · 74

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38 more
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 4; 2023: 6; 2024: 3; 2025: 3.

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  1. 2022ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?cited by 327
  2. 2023Grounding Large Language Models in Interactive Environments with Online Reinforcement Learningcited by 195
  3. 2023Minding Language Models' (Lack of) Theory of Mind: A Plug-and-Play Multi-Character Belief Trackercited by 95
  4. 2024Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators?cited by 52
  5. 2023ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Gamescited by 23
  6. 2025debug-gym: A Text-Based Environment for Interactive Debuggingcited by 19
  7. 2021Hey AI, Can You Solve Complex Tasks by Talking to Agents?cited by 13
  8. 2022TextWorldExpress: Simulating Text Games at One Million Steps Per Secondcited by 13
  9. 2022Behavior Cloned Transformers are Neurosymbolic Reasonerscited by 10
  10. 2024STARLING: Self-supervised Training of Text-based Reinforcement Learning Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 8
  11. 2022Ontologically Faithful Generation of Non-Player Character Dialoguescited by 7
  12. 2024A Survey on Complex Tasks for Goal-Directed Interactive Agentscited by 2
5 more
  1. 2023Self-Supervised Behavior Cloned Transformers are Path Crawlers for Text Gamescited by 1
  2. 2025Plant in Cupboard, Orange on Rably, Inat Aphone. Benchmarking Incremental Learning of Situation and Language Model using a Text-Simulated Situated Environmentcited by 1
  3. 2023A Song of Ice and Fire: Analyzing Textual Autotelic Agents in ScienceWorldcited by 0
  4. 2023Remember what you did so you know what to do nextcited by 0
  5. 2025ByteSized32Refactored: Towards an Extensible Interactive Text Games Corpus for LLM World Modeling and Evaluationcited by 0