Narrative summarization with integrated perception, interpretation, and text generation
August 10th, 2020 8:30 am - 9:30 am PT
Andrew Gordon
Research Associate Professor
University of Southern California
Website: https:/people.ict.usc.edu/gordon/public_html/
Abstract: Answering the question "What happened?" requires the interplay of perception, interpretation, and language production capabilities. Recent progress in the areas of automated perception and text generation give some hope that a robust narrative summarization pipeline is on the horizon. However, a deeper understanding of the central process of interpretation is needed, along with an understanding of the role that it plays in an integrated system. In this invited talk I will describe recent work on generating narrative summaries of events in multiplayer virtual simulations, which advances our previous work on narrative summarization as applied to the classic Heider-Simmel film.
Bio: Andrew S. Gordon is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Interactive Narrative Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. His research advances technologies for automatically analyzing and generating narrative interpretations of time-series data. A central aim of his research is the large-scale formalization of commonsense knowledge, and reasoning with these formalizations using logical abduction. He is the author of the 2004 book - "Strategy Representation - An Analysis of Planning Knowledge" and the 2017 book "A Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology - How People Think People Think" (with Jerry R. Hobbs). He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Northwestern University.