CoC Assistant Professor Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's paper, "Natural Language Understanding in Facade: Surface-text Processing," describing the natural language understanding infrastructure for the interactive drama Facade, won "Best Paper" at TIDSE 2004 (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment) held July 24-26, 2004 in Darmstadt, Germany.

TIDSE 2004 brought together researchers, developers and practitioners working in the areas of art and design, human sciences, computer sciences and related areas. The conference covered a wide range of story and entertainment related invetigations including authoring, user interfaces, games, dramaturgy and applications. Conference participators got a deep insight into innovative technologies of TIDSE, relevant for commerce and industry. It was a platform for communication and exchange of new ideas to improve game industries, interactive entertainment, information management, web technologies, education and training, infotainment, movie industry and industry with world wide dependences. The conference featured several informal get-together possibilities to give room for talks and contacts. For more information, visit http://www.zgdv.de/TIDSE04.