Please join us for the last NLP Seminar of the semester on Monday, April 30, at 4:00pm in 202 South Hall. All are welcome!
Speaker: Marilyn Walker (UCSC)
Title: Modeling Narrative Structure in Informal First-Person Narratives
Abstract:
Many genres of natural language text are narratively structured, reflecting the human bias towards organizing our experiences as narratives. Understanding narrative structure in full requires many discourse-level NLP components, including modeling the motivations, goals and desires of the protagonists, modelling the affect states of the protagonists and their transitions across story timepoints, and modelling the causal links between story events. This talk will focus on our recent work on modeling first-person participant goals and desires and their outcomes. I describe DesireDB, a collection of personal first-person stories from the Spinn3r corpus, which are annotated for statements of desire, textual evidence for desire fulfillment, and whether the stated desire is fulfilled given the evidence in the narrative context. I will describe experiments on tracking desire fulfillment using different methods, and show that a LSTM Skip-Thought model using the context both before and after the desire statement achieves an F-Measure of 0.7 on the corpus. I will also briefly discuss our work on modelling affect states and causal links between story events on the same corpus of informal stories.
The presented work was jointly conducted with Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Jiaqi Wu, Pranav Anand, Ruimin Wang, Lena Reed and Shereen Oraby.
Biography:
Marilyn Walker, is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, and a fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), in recognition of her for fundamental contributions to statistical methods for dialog optimization, to centering theory, and to expressive generation for dialog. Her current research includes work on computational models of dialogue interaction and conversational agents, analysis of affect, sarcasm and other social phenomena in social media dialogue, acquiring causal knowledge from text, conversational summarization, interactive story and narrative generation, and statistical methods for training the dialogue manager and the language generation engine for dialogue systems.
Before coming to Santa Cruz in 2009, Walker was a professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield. From 1996 to 2003, she was a principal member of the research staff at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research, where she worked on the AT&T Communicator project, developing a new architecture for spoken dialogue systems and statistical methods for dialogue management and generation. Walker has published more than 200 papers and has more than 10 U.S. patents granted. She earned an M.S. in computer science at Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.