GAMNLP 2015 - 4th Workshop on Games and NLP

Natural language processing (NLP) investigates computational aspects of natural language, languages that humans use to communicate and understand. While the field of NLP ranges from theoretical studies (e.g., parsing algorithms, computational models of dialogue) to practical applications (e.g., information retrieval, conversational agents, machine translation), this workshop will focus on NLP in games. In particular, the workshop aims at exploring the overlap between the two fields and promoting interaction and collaboration among researchers and practitioners of the fields for mutual benefit. For example, games could benefit from NLP's sophisticated human language technologies in designing natural and engaging dialogues to bring novel game experiences, or in processing texts to conduct formal game studies. Conversely, NLP could benefit from games in obtaining language resources (e.g., construction of a thesaurus through a crowdsourcing game), or in learning the linguistic characteristics of game users as compared to those of other domains.
The Workshop has been successfully held three times before: the 1st workshop in 2012 (GAMNLP-12) as a special session at the 8th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (JapTAL 2012), the 2nd workshop in 2013 (GAMNLP-13) at the 6th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2013), and the 3rd in 2014 (GAMNLP-14) as a full-day workshop at the 10th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-14). To continue to promote the cross-feeding between the two fields, the 4th workshop is organized workshop again at AIIDE-15
The workshop will welcome the participation of both academics and industry practitioners interested in the use of NLP in games or vice versa.
Topics of Interest
Text-based Interactive Narrative Systems
Narrative comprehension
Narrative generation
Text realization
Discourse planning and management in games
Dialogue management
Natural language generation
Natural language understanding
Question generation
Question answering
Information and content extraction, text mining
Analysis of large-scale game-related corpora (e.g., game reviews, gameplay logs)
Real-time sentiment analysis of player discourse or chat
Summarization of gameplay
Real-time commentary for games
Natural language interaction in games
Speech recognition and synthesis in games and in-game chat systems
Language-based real-time interaction with virtual characters
Chatterbots and conversational agents
Recommender systems for game players
Context-aware systems in virtual environment
Procedural generation of other natural-language game content
Automated construction of game ontologies
Serious games for learning languages
Organizing Committee
Noriko Tomuro, DePaul University
James Owen Ryan, University of California, Santa Cruz
Stephanie Lukin, University of California, Santa Cruz
Marilyn Walker, University of California, Santa Cruz