Storytelling Workshop 2019

August 1, 2019
Florence, Italy (Co-located with ACL 2019)

The Second Workshop of Storytelling
#StoryNLP2019

Program is available now!

Storytelling

Human storytelling has existed for as far back as we can trace, predating writing. Humans have used stories for entertainment, education, cultural preservation; to convey experiences, history, lessons, morals; and to share the human experience.

Part of grounding artificial intelligence work in human experience can involve the generation, understanding, and sharing of stories. This workshop highlights the diverse work being done in storytelling and AI across different fields.

Keynote Speaker: Melissa Roemmele

Automated Assistance for Story Writing: Exploring a New Generation Paradigm

Abstract: AI has long envisioned using computers to automatically write stories. While a lot of work focuses on systems that perform this task autonomously, another objective is for applications to collaborate with human authors in augmenting their story writing abilities. In this talk, I’ll discuss the foundations and challenges of automated assistance for story writing, focusing in particular on the issue of supporting creativity. Motivated by observations from my own research on this endeavor, I’ll propose that it requires a different paradigm from that of other generation tasks, one that centers on the goals of the human author.

Bio: I’m a research scientist at SDL in Los Angeles, working on interactive applications that use NLP to facilitate content understanding and creation. I recently completed my PhD in the Department of Computer Science at University of Southern California. There I worked at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in the Narrative Group led by my advisor Andrew Gordon, which pursues research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and storytelling. My thesis explored machine learning approaches for interactively predicting “what happens next” in text-based stories, both in a commonsense reasoning framework as well as for human authoring support.

Organizers

Pennsylvania State University
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Army Research Laboratory

Program Committee

  • Snigdha Chaturvedi, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Elizabeth Clark, University of Washington
  • David Elson, Google
  • Drew Farris, Booz Allen Hamilton
  • Mark Finlayson, Florida International University
  • Jon Gillick, University of California, Berkeley
  • Andrew Gordon, University of Southern California
  • Daphne Ippolito, University of Pennsylvania
  • Anna Kasunic, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Lun-Wei Ku, Academia Sinica
  • Boyang "Albert" Li, Baidu Research
  • Joao Magalhaes, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
  • Ramesh Manuvinakurike, University of Southern California
  • Lara Martin, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Cynthia Matuszek, University of Maryland Baltimore County
  • Nanyun Peng, University of Southern California
  • Eli Pincus, University of Southern California
  • Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Google
  • Melissa Roemmele, SDL
  • Mark Riedl, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Mariët Theune, University of Twente