Speaker: Lara J. Martin
Time: 09/11/2020, 12.30pm - 1.30pm
Location: https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/live-event/gdakksqz

Title: 

Dungeons and Discourse: Using Computational Storytelling to Look at Natural Language Use

Abstract:

Although we are currently riding a technological wave of personal assistants, many of these agents still struggle to communicate appropriately. Humans are natural storytellers, so it would be fitting if artificial intelligence could tell stories as well. Automated story generation is an area of AI research that aims to create agents that tell “good” stories. Previous story generation systems use planning and discrete symbols to create new stories, but these systems require a vast amount of knowledge engineering. The stories created by these systems are coherent, but only a finite set of stories can be generated. In contrast, very large neural language models, such as transformers, have made the headlines in the natural language processing community. Though impressive on the surface, these models begin to lose coherence over time. My research looks at various techniques of automated story generation, culminating in the blend of symbolic and neural approaches. In this talk, I show how a neuro-symbolic model can provide more interesting and coherent stories than those from solely neural or symbolic systems. 

Bio:

Lara J. Martin is a Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. Candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Her work resides in the field of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence with a focus on natural language applications. Lara has worked in the areas of automated story generation, speech processing, and affective computing, publishing in top-tier conferences such as AAAI and IJCAI. Lara earned a Masters of Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015 and a BS in Computer Science & Linguistics from Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 2013. In 2019, she received Georgia Tech’s prestigious Foley Scholar Award for her innovative research and the Best Doctoral Consortium Presentation award at the 2019 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference. As a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellowship recipient, she will be joining Dr. Chris Callison-Burch as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also been featured in Wired.