| Thu, Aug 28, 2025 |
Intro to the class, Interactive Fiction, and Automated Story Generation
(Module 0)
[slides]
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Play a text adventure game
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| Tue, Sep 2, 2025 |
Neural Language Models + Attention
(Module 1)
[slides]
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| Wed, Sep 3, 2025 |
Waitlist Deadline
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| Thu, Sep 4, 2025 |
Waitlists Deactivated
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| Thu, Sep 4, 2025 |
Transformers
(Module 1)
[slides]
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Visualizing Attention
(Optional) Transformers Tutorial
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Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
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Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, [Transformer paper] Attention is All You Need
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Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, [GPT-2 paper] Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
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Roy Schwartz, Jesse Dodge, Noah A. Smith, Oren Etzioni, Green AI
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| Fri, Sep 5, 2025 |
Grad Presentation Sign-up Due
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| Tue, Sep 9, 2025 |
Prompting and Decoding
(Module 1)
[slides]
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Prompting
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Ari Holtzman, Jan Buys, Li Du, Maxwell Forbes, Yejin Choi, The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration
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Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, et al., [GPT-3 paper] Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
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Sander Schulhoff, Michael Ilie, Nishant Balepur, Konstantine Kahadze, Amanda Liu, Chenglei Si, Yinheng Li, Aayush Gupta, HyoJung Han, Sevien Schulhoff, Pranav Sandeep Dulepet, Saurav Vidyadhara, et al., The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques
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Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Brian Ichter, Fei Xia, Ed Chi, Quoc Le, Denny Zhou, Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
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| Wed, Sep 10, 2025 |
Last day to drop without a W
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| Thu, Sep 11, 2025 |
No Class - At Tapia
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| Fri, Sep 12, 2025 |
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HW0: Build a Text-Adventure Game
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| Tue, Sep 16, 2025 |
Foundation Models + Word Embeddings
(Module 1)
[slides]
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Word Embeddings Poll
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Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, Jeffrey Dean, [word2vec paper] Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space
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Piotr Bojanowski, Edouard Grave, Armand Joulin, Tomas Mikolov, [FastText paper] Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information
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Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
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Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, Peter J. Liu, [T5 paper] Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer
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| Thu, Sep 18, 2025 |
Module 1 Paper Presentations
(Module 1)
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| Tue, Sep 23, 2025 |
Scripts and Events
(Module 2)
[slides]
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Script Graph
Script Facts Poll
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Roger Schank, Robert Abelson, Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures (Chapter 3: Scripts)
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Karl Pichotta, Raymond Mooney, Learning Statistical Scripts with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks
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Lara J. Martin, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Xinyu Wang, William Hancock, Shruti Singh, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Event Representations for Automated Story Generation with Deep Neural Nets
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Nathanael Chambers and Dan Jurafsky, Unsupervised Learning of Narrative Schemas and their Participants
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Keisuke Sakaguchi, Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Niket Tandon, Peter Clark, Yejin Choi, proScript: Partially Ordered Scripts Generation via Pre-trained Language Models
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Abhilasha Sancheti, Rachel Rudinger, What do Large Language Models Learn about Scripts?
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| Thu, Sep 25, 2025 |
Understanding Procedures
(Module 2)
[slides]
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Belinda Z. Li, Maxwell Nye, Jacob Andreas, Implicit Representations of Meaning in Neural Language Models
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Qing Lyu, Li Zhang, Chris Callison-Burch, Goal-Oriented Script Construction
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Li Zhang, Qing Lyu, Chris Callison-Burch, Reasoning about Goals, Steps, and Temporal Ordering with WikiHow
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Li Zhang, Qing Lyu, Chris Callison-Burch, Intent Detection with WikiHow
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Rowan Zellers, Yonatan Bisk, Roy Schwartz, Yejin Choi, SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inference
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| Tue, Sep 30, 2025 |
Guided Story Generation
(Module 2)
[slides]
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Guided Generation System Comparison
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Lili Yao, Nanyun Peng, Ralph Weischedel, Kevin Knight, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan, Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling
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Hannah Rashkin, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yejin Choi, Jianfeng Gao, PlotMachines: Outline-Conditioned Generation with Dynamic Plot State Tracking
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Angela Fan, Mike Lewis, Yann Dauphin, Hierarchical Neural Story Generation
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Hongqiu Wu, Weiqi Wu, Tianyang Xu, Jiameng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama
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| Thu, Oct 2, 2025 |
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
(Module 2)
[slides]
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Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Naman Goyal, Heinrich Küttler, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela, Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
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Rachel Chambers, Naomi Tack, Eliot Pearson, Lara J. Martin, Francis Ferraro, BERALL: Generating Retrieval-augmented State-based Interactive Fiction Games
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Zhihua Wen, Zhiliang Tian, Wei Wu, Yuxin Yang, Yanqi Shi, Zhen Huang, Dongsheng Li, GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence
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| Tue, Oct 7, 2025 |
Module 2 Paper Presentations
(Module 2)
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| Thu, Oct 9, 2025 |
AI Agents and Search
(Module 3)
[slides]
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Search Algorithms for Action Castle
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| Fri, Oct 10, 2025 |
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HW1: Prompting and Fine-tuning
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| Tue, Oct 14, 2025 |
Classical Planning and Story/Game Planning
(Module 3)
[slides]
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Rogelio Cardona-Rivera, Arnav Jhala, Julie Porteous, R. Michael Young, The Story So Far on Narrative Planning
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Michael Lebowitz, Story-Telling as Planning and Learning
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Michael Lebowitz, Planning Stories
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Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, CPOCL: A Narrative Planner Supporting Conflict
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Mark O. Riedl, R. Michael Young, Open-World Planning for Story Generation
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R. Michael Young, Stephen Ware, Brad Cassell, Justus Robertson, Plans and planning in narrative generation: a review of plan-based approaches to the generation of story, discourse and interactivity in narratives
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Julie Porteous, Marc Cavazza, Controlling narrative generation with planning trajectories: The role of constraints
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Stephen G. Ware, Cory Siler, Sabre: A Narrative Planner Supporting Intention and Deep Theory of Mind
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Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, Glaive: A State-Space Narrative Planner Supporting Intentionality and Conflict
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Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Integrating Plot, Character and Natural Language Processing in the Interactive Drama Façade
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Manu Sharma, Santiago Ontañón, Manish Mehta, Ashwin Ram, Drama Management and Player Modeling for Interactive Fiction Games
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Stephen G. Ware, Edward T. Garcia, Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell, Multi-Agent Narrative Experience Management as Story Graph Pruning
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Julie Porteous, João F. Ferreira, Alan Lindsay, Marc Cavazza, Automated narrative planning model extension
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| Thu, Oct 16, 2025 |
LLM-based Formal Planning
(Module 3)
[slides]
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Mihai Polceanu, Julie Porteous, Alan Lindsay, Marc Cavazza, Narrative Plan Generation with Self-Supervised Learning
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Nisha Simon, Christian Muise, Want To Choose Your Own Adventure? Then First Make a Plan.
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Yi Wang, Qian Zhou, David Ledo, StoryVerse: Towards Co-authoring Dynamic Plot with LLM-based Character Simulation via Narrative Planning
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Evgeniia Razumovskaia, Joshua Maynez, Annie Louis, Mirella Lapata, Shashi Narayan, Little Red Riding Hood Goes Around the Globe: Crosslingual Story Planning and Generation with Large Language Models
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Anbang Ye, Christopher Cui, Taiwei Shi, Mark O. Riedl, Neural Story Planning
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Li Zhang, Peter Jansen, Tianyi Zhang, Peter Clark, Chris Callison-Burch, Niket Tandon, PDDLEGO: Iterative Planning in Textual Environments
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Cassie Huang, Li Zhang, On the Limit of Language Models as Planning Formalizers
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| Fri, Oct 17, 2025 |
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Project Milestone 1: Proposal
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| Tue, Oct 21, 2025 |
Reinforcement Learning
(Module 3)
[slides]
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Pradyumna Tambwekar, Murtaza Dhuliawala, Lara J. Martin, Animesh Mehta, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reward Shaping
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Amal Alabdulkarim, Winston Li, Lara J. Martin, Mark O. Riedl, Goal-Directed Story Generation: Augmenting Generative Language Models with Reinforcement Learning
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Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark O. Riedl, Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
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Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Jack Urbanek, Margaret Li, Arthur Szlam, Tim Rocktäschel, Jason Weston, How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worlds
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Anjie Zhu, Hongcai He, Yongjun Yang, Zetao Zheng, Jie Shao, Hands-Free: Action Abstraction With Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in Text-Based Games
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| Thu, Oct 23, 2025 |
Module 3 Paper Presentations
(Module 3)
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| Tue, Oct 28, 2025 |
Commonsense Reasoning and Causality
(Module 4)
[slides]
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Robyn Speer, Joshua Chin, Catherine Havasi, ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge
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Christiane Fellbaum, WordNet
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Maarten Sap, Ronan Le Bras, Emily Allaway, Chandra Bhagavatula, Nicholas Lourie, Hannah Rashkin, Brendan Roof, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi, ATOMIC: An Atlas of Machine Commonsense for If-Then Reasoning
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Kathy Panton, Cynthia Matuszek, Douglas Lenat, Dave Schneider, Michael Witbrock, Nick Siegel, and Blake Shepard, Common Sense Reasoning – From Cyc to Intelligent Assistant
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Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Joyce Y. Chai, Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Understanding: A Survey of Benchmarks, Resources, and Approaches
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Gabor Angeli & Chris Manning, NaturalLI: Natural Logic Inference for Common Sense Reasoning
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Yidan Sun, Qin Chao, Boyang Li, Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding
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| Wed, Oct 29, 2025 |
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HW2: Guided Generation
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| Thu, Oct 30, 2025 |
Commonsense 2
(Module 4)
[slides]
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Marie-Laure Ryan, Fiction, Non-Factuals, and the Principle of Minimal Departure
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Martha Palmer, Claire Bonial, Jena Hwang, VerbNet: Capturing English verb behavior, meaning and usage
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Josef Ruppenhofer, Michael Ellsworth, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Christopher R. Johnson, Collin F. Baker, Jan Scheffczyk, FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice
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| Tue, Nov 4, 2025 |
Neurosymbolic Knowledge Base Systems
(Module 4)
[slides]
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Jena D. Hwang, Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Jeff Da, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Antoine Bosselut, Yejin Choi, (COMET-)ATOMIC2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs
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Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Aditya Kalyanpur, Lori Moon, David Buchanan, Lauren Berkowitz, Or Biran, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations
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Zhongyang Li, Xiao Ding, Ting Liu, J. Edward Hu, Benjamin Van Durme, Guided Generation of Cause and Effect
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Peter Clark, Bhavana Dalvi, Niket Tandon, What Happened? Leveraging VerbNet to Predict the Effects of Actions in Procedural Text
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Peter West, Ronan Bras, Taylor Sorensen, Bill Lin, Liwei Jiang, Ximing Lu, Khyathi Chandu, Jack Hessel, Ashutosh Baheti, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi, NovaCOMET: Open Commonsense Foundation Models with Symbolic Knowledge Distillation
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| Wed, Nov 5, 2025 |
Last day to withdraw from a course
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| Thu, Nov 6, 2025 |
Storytelling with Schemas + World Modeling
(Module 4)
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Yu Zhu, Rong Pan, Simple Contrastive Learning with Knowledge Graphs for Story Generation
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Xiangyu Peng, Kaige Xie, Amal Alabdulkarim, Harshith Kayam, Samihan Dani, Mark Riedl, Guiding Neural Story Generation with Reader Models
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Chenkai Sun, Tie Xu, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji, Incorporating Task-specific Concept Knowledge into Script Learning
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Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds
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László von Kacsoh, Robin Horst, Ralf Dörner, From Stat Block to Tabletop: A First-Order Logic Framework for Authoring Immersive RPG Combat Encounters
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Shanshan Huang, Kenny Q. Zhu, Qianzi Liao, Libin Shen, Yinggong Zhao, Enhanced Story Representation by ConceptNet for Predicting Story Endings
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Peter A. Jansen, A Systematic Survey of Text Worlds as Embodied Natural Language Environments
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Marc-Alexandre Côté, Ákos Kádár, Xingdi Yuan, Ben Kybartas, Tavian Barnes, Emery Fine, James Moore, Matthew Hausknecht, Ruo Yu Tao, Layla El Asri, Mahmoud Adada, Wendy Tay, and Adam Trischler, TextWorld: A Learning Environment for Text-based Games
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Matthew Hausknecht, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan, Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure
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Eric Zhou, Shreyas Basavatia, Moontashir Siam, Zexin Chen, Mark O. Riedl, STORY2GAME: Generating (Almost) Everything in an Interactive Fiction Game
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| Tue, Nov 11, 2025 |
Module 4 Paper Presentations
(Module 4)
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| Thu, Nov 13, 2025 |
Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
(Module 5)
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Alex Rudnicky, Xu Wei, An agenda-based dialog management architecture for spoken language systems
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Heng-Da Xu, Xian-Ling Mao, Puhai Yang, Fanshu Sun, Heyan Huang, Rethinking Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: From Complex Modularity to Zero-Shot Autonomous Agent
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Pei Zhou, Andrew Zhu, Jennifer Hu, Jay Pujara, Xiang Ren, Chris Callison-Burch, Yejin Choi, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, I Cast Detect Thoughts: Learning to Converse and Guide with Intents and Theory-of-Mind in Dungeons and Dragons
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| Fri, Nov 14, 2025 |
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HW3: Creating Sabre Problems
Final Project Milestone 2: Project Progress
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| Tue, Nov 18, 2025 |
Character-Based Generation
(Module 5)
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Jack Urbanek, Angela Fan, Siddharth Karamcheti, Saachi Jain, Samuel Humeau, Emily Dinan, Tim Rocktäschel, Douwe Kiela, Arthur Szlam, Jason Weston, Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game
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Wai Man Si, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark O. Riedl, Telling Stories through Multi-User Dialogue by Modeling Character Relations
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Shrimai Prabhumoye, Margaret Li, Jack Urbanek, Emily Dinan, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston, Arthur Szlam, I love your chain mail! Making knights smile in a fantasy game world: Open-domain goal-oriented dialogue agents
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Chris Callison-Burch, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Lara J. Martin, Daphne Ippolito, Suma Bailis, David Reitter, Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialogue Challenge for Artificial Intelligence
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Anvesh Rao Vijjini, Faeze Brahman, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generation
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| Thu, Nov 20, 2025 |
Personas and Roleplaying
(Module 5)
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Ke Ji, Yixin Lian, Linxu Li, Jingsheng Gao, Weiyuan Li, Bin Dai, Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs' Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning
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Seungwon Lim, Seungbeen Lee, Dongjun Min, Youngjae Yu, Persona Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Persona Traits on Agents in Text-Based Games
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Silin Gao, Beatriz Borges, Soyoung Oh, Deniz Bayazit, Saya Kanno, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji, Antoine Bosselut, PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives
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Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou, Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment
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Xuhui Zhou, Zhe Su, Tiwalayo Eisape, Hyunwoo Kim, Maarten Sap, Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs
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| Fri, Nov 21, 2025 |
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Project Milestone 3: Rough Draft
HW4: COMET-ATOMIC Schema
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| Tue, Nov 25, 2025 |
Interactive Storytelling
(Module 5)
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Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds
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Andrew Zhu, Evan Osgood, Chris Callison-Burch, First Steps Towards Overhearing LLM Agents: A Case Study With Dungeons & Dragons Gameplay
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Andrew Zhu, Lara J. Martin, Andrew Head, Chris Callison-Burch, CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistants
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Piotr Mirowski, Kory W. Mathewson, Jaylen Pittman, Richard Evans, Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: Evaluation by Industry Professionals
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Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, Emily Reif, Daphne Ippolito, Wordcraft: story writing with large language models
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Ben Samuel, James Ryan, Adam J. Summerville, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Bad News: An Experiment in Computationally Assisted Performance
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| Thu, Nov 27, 2025 |
Thanksgiving - No Class
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| Tue, Dec 2, 2025 |
Module 5 Paper Presentations
(Module 5)
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| Thu, Dec 4, 2025 |
Evaluation
(Module 6)
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Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Nathanael Chambers, Xiaodong He, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Lucy Vanderwende, Pushmeet Kohli, James Allen, A Corpus and Cloze Evaluation for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories
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Dingyi Yang, Qin Jin, What Matters in Evaluating Book-Length Stories? A Systematic Study of Long Story Evaluation
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Yi Wang, Max Kreminski, Can LLMs Generate Good Stories? Insights and Challenges from a Narrative Planning Perspective
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Hannah Rashkin, Elizabeth Clark, Fantine Huot, Mirella Lapata, Help Me Write a Story: Evaluating LLMs’ Ability to Generate Writing Feedback
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| Tue, Dec 9, 2025 |
Final Project In-Class Help
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| Thu, Dec 11, 2025 |
Final Project Presentations, 10:30am - 12:30pm
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Project Milestone 4: Final Submission
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