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

Lara J. Martin, PhD

CIFellow Postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania


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

Researcher



I'm very excited to be starting as a tenure-track assistant professor at UMBC this August!
Email me if you are/are going to be a UMBC student and are interested in joining my lab.

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.
CV
My Interactive Fiction and Story Generation Resource List

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

News

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Contact

Online
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Email
In Person
Towne Building, Room 297
220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia PA, 19104

Research Accounts

Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Everything else
Github Research Gate Semantic Scholar Academia.edu ORCID Web of Science dblp arXiv Scopus

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 is a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania working with Dr. Chris Callison-Burch. In 2020, 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. Dr. Martin’s work resides in the field of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence with a focus on natural language applications. They have worked in the areas of automated story generation, speech processing, and affective computing, publishing in top-tier conferences such as AAAI, EMNLP, and IJCAI. They have also been featured in Wired and BBC Science Focus magazine.

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

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. arXiv data 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}, publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics} }
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. arXiv 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}, address={Toronto, Canada}, publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics} }
CoRRPUS: Code-based Structured Prompting for Neurosymbolic Story Understanding
Yijiang River Dong, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch. Findings of ACL, Toronto, Canada. 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 ACL 2023}, month={7}, address={Toronto, Canada}, publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics} }

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 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}, url={https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.637}, month={12}, publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics} }
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 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={1}, url={https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/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!
@inproceedings{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}, booktitle={{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}, 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}, 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. 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}, 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!
@inproceedings{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.}, booktitle={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} }

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}, organization={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}, organization={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}, organization={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. 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.


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


Next-Gen Innovators: Penn Engineering Postdoctoral Fellows Lead the Way on Groundbreaking Research by Amy Biemiller for Penn Engineering Magazine.
Fall 2022.

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

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...

Read More

Fun Facts

Random Stuff

I have been collecting a list of American English idioms for foriegn friends.

I created a machine translation system with Vivian Robison for translating the Bible from LOLspeak to English.

I am a downloadable voice in the speech synthesis tool Festvox (voice "US English Female LJM").

I presented at SIGBOVIK 2015 (a fake conference) on "Language Sequencing: Language as a Physical Entity" with Meghana Kshirsagar.

© Lara J. Martin. All rights reserved. Last updated May 11, 2023.
Design adapted from HTML Codex. Email scrambler by Jeff Donahue.