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Picture of Lara with purple asymmetric hair, dangly earrings, and a blue/maroon striped dress

Lara J. Martin, PhD

Assistant Professor at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County


Human-Centered AI, Applied NLP, Neurosymbolic Methods, Automated Story Generation, AAC, Dungeons and Dragons AI

Researcher

How to say Lara
I make systems that improve how people talk with computers and to each other through computers. Most of my career so far has been teaching computers how to tell stories (also known as automated story generation) and working my way towards an AI Dungeon Master. I am also currently working on Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC).
My pronouns are she/they.

Information about joining the Language, Aid, and Representation AI (LARA) Lab.

I put a lot of care into this website, so please let me know if something is inaccessible to you or broken in general.

Contact

Email
In Person
Information Technology and Engineering (ITE) Building, Room 216
1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250
Fall 2023 Open Office Hour:
Friday 10 AM ET

Joining the Language, Aid, and Representation AI Lab

(updated 8/13/2023)
What NOT to do:
  • Please do not call me Mam/Ma'am. It does not match my gender identity and makes me very uncomfortable. Stick to Doctor/Dr. Martin, Professor/Prof. Martin, or even just Lara.
  • I'm not interested in your TOEFL/GRE scores or your past grades. They don't tell me much about how you will do with research. If you do want to tell me about your education, let me know if you've taken any classes that might be relevant to the research I do (e.g., an AI or NLP course).
What to do:
For current UMBC Masters/Undergrads:
I've been getting a lot more interest than I can support. I'd like to get to know students before working with them. To give everyone an equal chance, I will get to know students through the classes that I teach. If you'd like to work with me, please enroll in my class. This semester I am teaching CMSC 671 Principles of Artificial Intelligence. If you can't get into the class, I will be holding open office hours (I'll post the time at the beginning of the semester) or you can request to join my weekly lab meeting, which will start out as a reading group.

For prospective PhD students:
I'm specificially looking for 2 PhD students to start in Fall 2024. I'm flexible, but I'm preferably looking for 1 student to work with me on story generation/Dungeon and Dragons AI work and 1 student to work with me on AAC and speech synthesis work.

When I read your email, I'm trying to get a sense of who you are as a person and what you're interested in doing. As a template, you can answer the following questions in your email — there are no wrong answers!
  • How did you find out about me and my work?
  • What interests you about my work? Was there something in particular that "called to you"? For example: why are you interested in story generation?
  • Why do you want to get a PhD?
  • What background (if any) do you have that supports working in this area?
  • Have you ever done research before? If not, have you ever guided a major project?
  • What are some of your research passions?

Once you're ready, you can send me an email!
And remember that I'm human so that means I don't always respond to emails immediately, and I don't have the resources or bandwidth to bring every person who emails me into my lab. Please don't take either personally!

Funding
Because I am new faculty, I currently do not have funding for undergraduate or masters students. (I do have funding for PhD students. See above.)
Your time and skills are valuable; you should never work for free. There are, however, some options for times when I don't have adequate funding for you. List based off of Dr. Tejas Gokhale's.

Biography

Bio

About Me

My research interests include:
human-AI communication/collaboration
  • computational creativity
  • interactive narrative
  • narrative generation & understanding
  • dialog systems & conversational agents
  • cognitive systems
and computer-mediated human-human communication
I work from a blend of research and methods from various fields:
  • natural language processing/language technologies,
  • linguistics,
  • human-computer interaction,
  • cognitive science,
  • and artifical intelligence.

Some of my non-research passions include AI equity, science communication, and educating children about computer science and technology — especially getting young girls and other minorities in tech interested in tech.

Check out my CV for more information.

Third-Person Bio

Dr. Lara J. Martin (she/they) is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the CSEE department, researching human-centered artificial intelligence with a focus on natural language processing applications. They have worked in the areas of automated story generation, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools, AI for tabletop roleplaying games, speech processing, and affective computing—publishing in top-tier conferences such as AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, and IJCAI. They have also been featured in Wired and BBC Science Focus magazine.
Previously, Dr. Martin was a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania working with Dr. Chris Callison-Burch. She earned her PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked with Dr. Mark Riedl. She also has a MS in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science & Linguistics from Rutgers University—New Brunswick.

Publications

Select Publications

For a full list, please refer to my Google Scholar page.

Sort by Topic

  • All
  • Speech
  • Story Generation
  • Story Understanding
  • Social Media
  • Dungeons & Dragons

2023

CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistants
Andrew Zhu, Lara J. Martin, Andrew Head, Chris Callison-Burch. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Salt Lake City, UT. paper arXiv bibTex
BibTex copied!
@article{Zhu2023CALYPSO, title={{CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistants}}, author={Zhu, Andrew and Martin, Lara J. and Head, Andrew and Callison-Burch, Chris}, year={2023}, eprint={2308.07540}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/27534}, pages={380--390}, doi={10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27534}, volume={19}, number={1}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE)}, month={10}, address={Salt Lake City, UT}, publisher={AAAI} }
Human-in-the-Loop Schema Induction
Tianyi Zhang, Isaac Tham, Zhaoyi Hou, Jiaxuan Ren, Liyang Zhou, Hainiu Xu, Li Zhang, Lara J. Martin, Rotem Dror, Sha Li, Heng Ji, Martha Palmer, Susan Brown, Reece Suchocki, Chris Callison-Burch. ACL Demonstrations, Toronto, Canada. paper arXiv bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{Zhang2023Schema, title={{Human-in-the-Loop Schema Induction}}, author={Zhang, Tianyi and Tham, Isaac and Hou, Zhaoyi and Ren, Jiaxuan and Zhou, Liyang and Xu, Hianiu and Zhang, Li and Martin, Lara J. and Dror, Rotem and Li, Sha and Ji, Heng and Palmer, Martha and Brown, Susan and Suchocki, Reece and Callison-Burch, Chris}, year={2023}, eprint={2302.13048}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, booktitle={Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL): System Demonstrations}, month={7}, address={Toronto, Canada}, url={https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-demo.1/}, pages={1--10}, publisher={ACL}, doi={10.18653/v1/2023.acl-demo.1} }
FIREBALL: A Dataset of Dungeons and Dragons Actual-Play with Structured Game State Information
Andrew Zhu, Karmanya Aggarwal, Alexander H. Feng, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch. Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Toronto, Canada. paper arXiv poster data bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{Zhu2023FIREBALL, title={{FIREBALL: A Dataset of Dungeons and Dragons Actual-Play with Structured Game State Information}}, author={Zhu, Andrew and Aggarwal, Karmanya and Feng, Alexander and Martin, Lara J. and Callison-Burch, Chris}, year={2023}, eprint={2305.01528}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, booktitle={Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)}, month={7}, url={https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.229/}, address={Toronto, Canada}, pages={4171--4193}, publisher={ACL}, doi={10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.229} }
CoRRPUS: Code-based Structured Prompting for Neurosymbolic Story Understanding
Yijiang River Dong, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch. Findings of ACL, Toronto, Canada. paper arXiv code bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{Dong2023CoRRPUS, title={{CoRRPUS: Code-based Structured Prompting for Neurosymbolic Story Understanding}}, author={Dong, Yijiang River and Martin, Lara J. and Callison-Burch, Chris}, year={2023}, eprint={2212.10754}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023}, month={7}, address={Toronto, Canada}, url={https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.832/}, pages={13152--13168}, publisher={ACL}, doi={10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.832} }

2022

Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialogue Challenge for Artificial Intelligence
Chris Callison-Burch, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Lara J. Martin, Daphne Ippolito, Suma Bailis, David Reitter. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Abu Dhabi, UAE. paper local pdf arXiv poster data bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{ccb2022dungeons, title={{Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialogue Challenge for Artificial Intelligence}}, author={Callison-Burch, Chris and Singh Tomar, Gaurav and Martin, Lara J. and Ippolito, Daphne and Bailis, Suma and Reitter, David}, booktitle={{Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)}}, year={2022}, pages={9379--9393}, eprint={2210.07109}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, address={Abu Dhabi, UAE}, publisher={ACL}, url={https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.637}, month={12}, doi={10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.637} }
Using Language Models to Convert Between Natural Language and Game Commands
Stefan Papazov, Wesley Gill, Marta García Ferreiro, Andrew Zhu, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch. NAACL 2022 Wordplay Workshop, Seattle, Washington. paper local pdf poster bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{papazov2022avrae, title={{Using Language Models to Convert Between Natural Language and Game Commands}}, author={Papazov, Stefan and Gill, Wesley and García Ferreiro, Marta and Zhu, Andrew and Martin, Lara J. and Callison-Burch, Chris}, booktitle={{Wordplay: Where Language Meets Games Workshop at NAACL 2022}}, year={2022}, month={7}, address={Seattle, WA}, url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=jQSStHwtmDN} }
CIS²: A Simplified Commonsense Inference Evaluation for Story Prose
Bryan Li, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch. ACL 2022 Workshop on Commonsense Representation and Reasoning (CSRR), Dublin, Ireland. paper local pdf arXiv poster code talk bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{li2022cis2, title={{$CIS^2$: A Simplified Commonsense Inference Evaluation for Story Prose}}, author={Li, Bryan and Martin, Lara J. and Callison-Burch, Chris}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, eprint = {2202.07880}, booktitle={{Workshop on Commonsense Representation and Reasoning (CSRR) at ACL 2022}}, year={2022}, month={5}, address={Dublin, Ireland}, url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=Se-xHMYg_bc} }

2021

Neurosymbolic Automated Story Generation
Lara J. Martin. Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology. paper local pdf bibTex
BibTex copied!
@phdthesis{martin2021thesis, title={{Neurosymbolic Automated Story Generation}}, school={Georgia Institute of Technology}, author={Martin, Lara J.}, year={2021}, month={4}, url={http://hdl.handle.net/1853/64643} }
Preprint
Goal-Directed Story Generation: Augmenting Generative Language Models with Reinforcement Learning
Amal Alabdulkarim, Winston Li, Lara J. Martin, Mark O. Riedl. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.08593. arXiv bibTex
BibTex copied!
@report{alabdulkarim2021goal, title={{Goal-Directed Story Generation: Augmenting Generative Language Models with Reinforcement Learning}}, author={Alabdulkarim, Amal and Li, Winston and Martin, Lara J. and Riedl, Mark O.}, year={2021}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, eprint={2112.08593}, url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.08593} }

2020

Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences
Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Ethan Tien, Wesley Cheung, Zhaochen Luo, William Ma, Lara J. Martin, Mark O. Riedl. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), New York, NY. paper arXiv slides poster code data bibTex
BibTex copied!
@article{ammanabrolu2020realization, title={{Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences}}, author={Ammanabrolu, Prithviraj and Tien, Ethan and Cheung, Wesley and Luo, Zhaochen and Ma, William and Martin, Lara J. and Riedl, Mark O.}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, eprint={1909.03480}, journal={{Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)}}, volume={34}, number={05}, year={2020}, pages={7375--7382}, month={4}, doi={10.1609/aaai.v34i05.6232}, publisher={AAAI}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/AAAI/article/view/6232}, address={New York, NY} }

2019

Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reward Shaping
Pradyumna Tambwekar, Murtaza Dhuliawala, Lara J. Martin, Animesh Mehta, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Macao, China. paper arXiv slides poster code bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{tambwekar2019controllable, title={{Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reward Shaping}}, author={Tambwekar, Pradyumna and Dhuliawala, Murtaza and Martin, Lara J. and Mehta, Animesh and Harrison, Brent and Riedl, Mark O.}, archivePrefix={arXiv}, eprint={1809.10736}, booktitle={{Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (IJCAI-19)}}, year={2019}, pages={5982--5988}, month={7}, doi={10.24963/ijcai.2019/829}, url={https://www.ijcai.org/proceedings/2019/829}, address={Macao, China} }
Guided Neural Language Generation for Automated Storytelling
Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Ethan Tien, Wesley Cheung, Zhaochen Luo, William Ma, Lara J. Martin, Mark O. Riedl. ACL 2019 Workshop of Storytelling (StoryNLP), Florence, Italy. paper slides bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{ammanabrolu2019guided, title={{Guided Neural Language Generation for Automated Storytelling}}, author={Ammanabrolu, Prithviraj and Tien, Ethan and Cheung, Wesley and Luo, Zhaochen and Ma, William and Martin, Lara J. and Riedl, Mark O.}, booktitle={{Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Storytelling (StoryNLP) at ACL 2019}}, year={2019}, pages={46--55}, month={8}, doi={10.18653/v1/W19-3405}, publisher={ACL}, url={https://aclanthology.org/W19-3405/}, address={Florence, Italy} }

2018

Dungeons and DQNs: Toward Reinforcement Learning Agents that Play Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Lara J. Martin, Srijan Sood, Mark O. Riedl. AAAI 2018 Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT), Edmonton, AB, Canada. paper local pdf slides bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{martin2018dungeons, title={{Dungeons and DQNs: Toward Reinforcement Learning Agents that Play Tabletop Roleplaying Games}}, author={Martin, Lara J. and Sood, Srijan and Riedl, Mark}, booktitle={Proceedings of the Joint AIIDE Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies and Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing (INT-WICED)}, year={2018}, month={11}, publisher={CEUR-WS}, url={https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2321/paper4.pdf}, address={Edmonton, AB, Canada} }
Event Representations for Automated Story Generation with Deep Neural Nets
Lara J. Martin, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Xinyu Wang, William Hancock, Shruti Singh, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), New Orleans, LA. paper arXiv poster code data bibTex
BibTex copied!
@article{martin2018event, title={{Event Representations for Automated Story Generation with Deep Neural Nets}}, author={Martin, Lara J. and Ammanabrolu, Prithviraj and Wang, Xinyu and Hancock, William and Singh, Shruti and Harrison, Brent and Riedl, Mark O.}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, volume={32}, number={1}, month={2}, year={2018}, pages={868--875}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/11430}, address={New Orleans, LA}, doi={10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11430}, publisher={AAAI} }

2017

Improvisational Storytelling Agents
Lara J. Martin, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Xinyu Wang, Shruti Singh, Brent Harrison, Murtaza Dhuliawala, Pradyumna Tambwekar, Animesh Mehta, Richa Arora, Nathan Dass, Chris Purdy, Mark O. Riedl. NeurIPS 2017 Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, Long Beach, CA. paper local pdf poster bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{martin2017improvisational, title={{Improvisational Storytelling Agents}}, author={Martin, Lara J. and Ammanabrolu, Prithviraj and Wang, Xinyu and Singh, Shruti and Harrison, Brent and Dhuliawala, Murtaza and Tambwekar, Pradyumna and Mehta, Animesh and Arora, Richa and Dass, Nathan and Purdy, Chris and Riedl, Mark O.}, booktitle={Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design (NeurIPS 2017)}, pages={4}, year={2017}, url={https://nips2017creativity.github.io/doc/Improvisational_Agents.pdf}, address={Long Beach, CA} }

2016

Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds
Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl. International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), Los Angeles, CA. paper local pdf slides bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{martin2016improvisational, title={{Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds}}, author={Martin, Lara J. and Harrison, Brent and Riedl, Mark O.}, booktitle={International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS)}, pages={73--84}, year={2016}, month={10}, publisher={Springer}, url={https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_7}, address={Los Angeles, CA} }

2015

Utterance Classification in Speech-to-Speech Translation for Zero-Resource Languages in the Hospital Administration Domain
Lara J. Martin, Andrew Wilkinson, Sai Sumanth Miryala, Vivian Robison, Alan W Black. IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), Scottsdale, AZ. paper local pdf poster bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{martin2015utterance, title={{Utterance Classification in Speech-to-Speech Translation for Zero-Resource Languages in the Hospital Administration Domain}}, author={Martin, Lara J. and Wilkinson, Andrew and Miryala, Sai Sumanth and Robison, Vivian and Black, Alan W}, booktitle={2015 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)}, pages={303--309}, month={12}, year={2015}, publisher={IEEE}, url={https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7404809}, doi={10.1109/ASRU.2015.7404809}, address={Scottsdale, AZ} }

2014

A Methodology for Using Crowdsourced Data to Measure Uncertainty in Natural Speech
Lara J. Martin, Matthew Stone, Florian Metze, Jack Mostow. IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), South Lake Tahoe, NV. paper local pdf poster bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{martin2014methodology, title={{A Methodology for Using Crowdsourced Data to Measure Uncertainty in Natural Speech}}, author={Martin, Lara and Stone, Matthew and Metze, Florian and Mostow, Jack}, booktitle={2014 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT)}, pages={95--99}, month={12}, year={2014}, publisher={IEEE}, doi={10.1109/SLT.2014.7078556}, url={https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7078556}, address={South Lake Tahoe, NV} }
Applause: A Learning Tool for Low-Resource Languages
Nikolas Wolfe, Vinay Vyas Vemuri, Lara J. Martin, Florian Metze, Alan W Black. CHI 2014 Workshop on Designing Speech and Language Interactions, Toronto, Canada. paper local pdf bibTex
BibTex copied!
@inproceedings{wolfeapplause, title={{Applause: A Learning Tool for Low-Resource Languages}}, author={Wolfe, Nikolas and Vemuri, Vinay Vyas and Martin, Lara J. and Metze, Florian and Black, Alan W}, booktitle={Designing Speech and Language Interactions Workshop (CHI 2014)}, address={Toronto, Canada}, year={2014} }

Teaching

Teaching

I have a teaching certificate from Georgia Tech, Summer 2018.

CMSC 671 Principles of Artificial Intelligence
Fall 2023
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
CIS 700 Interactive Fiction and Text Generation
Spring 2022
University of Pennsylvania
Co-taught with Dr. Chris Callison-Burch
CS 3790 Introduction to Cognitive Science
Summer 2018
Georgia Institute of Technology

Media

Select Media


Hallucinating ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons by Thomas Claburn for The Register.
Aug 19, 2023.

Lara Martin: "How Can I get a system to tell a story about anything I want?" by Masoud Golsorkhi for TANK Magazine, Issue 88 (Narrative).
Autumn 2021.

Lara Martin on teaching AI to tell stories by Amy Barrett for Science Focus Podcast.
Mar 15, 2021.

Alexa, tell me a story by Amy Barrett for Science Focus Magazine.
Feb 17, 2021.

Forget Chess—the Real Challenge Is Teaching AI to Play D&D by Will Knight for Wired.
Feb 28, 2020.

Talks

Recorded Talks

9/11/2020 - Georgia Tech's NLP Seminar Series


5/5/2022 - USC's Natural Language Seminar


Blog

Latest Blog

01

Jul
ChatGPT will not replace writers...unless we let it
What you should and shouldn't be concerned about when it comes to your writing job. · 4 minute read

It looks like the Writers Guild (the union for people who write movies and TV...

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21

Jun
No, LaMDA Isn't Sentient
I explain at a high level why LaMDA can't be sentient. · 5 minute read

[Expanded from a Facebook post of mine, originally posted June 14, 2022.] You might have...

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Fun Facts

Random Stuff