[Module 0] [Module 1] [Module 2] [Module 3] [Module 4] [Module 5] [Module 6]
Thursday, August 28, 2025 to Thursday, August 28, 2025
Welcome to the class! In this introductory module, you will become acquainted with interactive fiction (since you’re probably too young to know what it is) and learn about the field of automated story generation (since it’s a small subfield of AI and you probably haven’t heard of it). You’ll even get a chance to make your own mini interactive fiction game the old-school way!
Academic Papers:
Supplemental Media:
Jason Scott, GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (video, 2 hours)
Mark Riedl, An Introduction to AI Story Generation
Infocom, Inc., Zork I: The Great Underground Empire
Tuesday, September 2, 2025 to Thursday, September 18, 2025
With large language models becoming more popular within Natural Language Processing/Generation (NLP/NLG), automated story generation researchers realized how much easier it is to generate text. (And this also helped NLP researchers get interested in story generation!) Here, you’ll learn about neural language models, particularly the transformer, how to work with them, and how they are used to generate stories.
Academic Papers:
Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le, Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
Alex Graves, Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks
Supplemental Media:
Elle Hunt (The Guardian), Tay, Microsoft’s AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter
Tom Simonite (Wired), The AI Text Generator That’s Too Dangerous to Make Public
Academic Papers:
Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, [Transformer paper] Attention is All You Need
Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, [GPT-2 paper] Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
Roy Schwartz, Jesse Dodge, Noah A. Smith, Oren Etzioni, Green AI
Supplemental Media:
Academic Papers:
Ari Holtzman, Jan Buys, Li Du, Maxwell Forbes, Yejin Choi, The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration
Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, et al., [GPT-3 paper] Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Pengfei Liu, Weizhe Yuan, Jinlan Fu, Zhengbao Jiang, Hiroaki Hayashi, Graham Neubig, Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing
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
Supplemental Media:
Kory Mathewson, What is Prompting, Really?
Janelle Shane, AI Weirdness (Newsletter)
Academic Papers:
Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, Jeffrey Dean, [word2vec paper] Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space
Piotr Bojanowski, Edouard Grave, Armand Joulin, Tomas Mikolov, [FastText paper] Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
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
Supplemental Media:
Paper Presentations:
Academic Papers:
Tuesday, September 23, 2025 to Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Scripts can be considered the backbone of storytelling. They help us fill in the gaps of knowledge that we would otherwise be missing from reading a story, and they help us reason about why events happen and what order they happen in. This Module will teach you about scripts, causal chains, and events. We’ll also look at how people have been using these techniques in the age of the neural network.
Academic Papers:
Roger Schank, Robert Abelson, Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures (Chapter 3: Scripts)
Karl Pichotta, Raymond Mooney, Learning Statistical Scripts with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks
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
Nathanael Chambers and Dan Jurafsky, Unsupervised Learning of Narrative Schemas and their Participants
Keisuke Sakaguchi, Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Niket Tandon, Peter Clark, Yejin Choi, proScript: Partially Ordered Scripts Generation via Pre-trained Language Models
Abhilasha Sancheti, Rachel Rudinger, What do Large Language Models Learn about Scripts?
Academic Papers:
Belinda Z. Li, Maxwell Nye, Jacob Andreas, Implicit Representations of Meaning in Neural Language Models
Qing Lyu, Li Zhang, Chris Callison-Burch, Goal-Oriented Script Construction
Li Zhang, Qing Lyu, Chris Callison-Burch, Reasoning about Goals, Steps, and Temporal Ordering with WikiHow
Li Zhang, Qing Lyu, Chris Callison-Burch, Intent Detection with WikiHow
Rowan Zellers, Yonatan Bisk, Roy Schwartz, Yejin Choi, SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inference
Academic Papers:
Lili Yao, Nanyun Peng, Ralph Weischedel, Kevin Knight, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan, Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling
Hannah Rashkin, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yejin Choi, Jianfeng Gao, PlotMachines: Outline-Conditioned Generation with Dynamic Plot State Tracking
Angela Fan, Mike Lewis, Yann Dauphin, Hierarchical Neural Story Generation
Hongqiu Wu, Weiqi Wu, Tianyang Xu, Jiameng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama
Academic Papers:
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
Rachel Chambers, Naomi Tack, Eliot Pearson, Lara J. Martin, Francis Ferraro, BERALL: Generating Retrieval-augmented State-based Interactive Fiction Games
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
Supplemental Media:
Paper Presentations:
Academic Papers:
Thursday, October 9, 2025 to Thursday, October 23, 2025
Academic Papers:
Supplemental Media:
Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Chapter 2: Intelligent Agents
Peter Norvig and Stuart J. Russell, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Chapter 3
Peter Norvig and Stuart J. Russell, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Chapter 11
Wikipedia, Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver
Kory Becker, Artificial Intelligence Planning with STRIPS, A Gentle Introduction
Academic Papers:
Rogelio Cardona-Rivera, Arnav Jhala, Julie Porteous, R. Michael Young, The Story So Far on Narrative Planning
Michael Lebowitz, Story-Telling as Planning and Learning
Michael Lebowitz, Planning Stories
Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, CPOCL: A Narrative Planner Supporting Conflict
Mark O. Riedl, R. Michael Young, Open-world planning for story generation
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
Julie Porteous, Marc Cavazza, Controlling narrative generation with planning trajectories: The role of constraints
Stephen G. Ware, Cory Siler, Sabre: A Narrative Planner Supporting Intention and Deep Theory of Mind
Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, Glaive: A State-Space Narrative Planner Supporting Intentionality and Conflict
Mihai Polceanu, Julie Porteous, Alan Lindsay, Marc Cavazza, Narrative Plan Generation with Self-Supervised Learning
Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Integrating Plot, Character and Natural Language Processing in the Interactive Drama Façade
Manu Sharma, Santiago Ontañón, Manish Mehta, Ashwin Ram, Drama Management and Player Modeling for Interactive Fiction Games
Stephen G. Ware, Edward T. Garcia, Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell, Multi-Agent Narrative Experience Management as Story Graph Pruning
Supplemental Media:
Academic Papers:
Nisha Simon & Christian Muise, Want To Choose Your Own Adventure? Then First Make a Plan.
Yi Wang, Qian Zhou, David Ledo, StoryVerse: Towards Co-authoring Dynamic Plot with LLM-based Character Simulation via Narrative Planning
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
Anbang Ye, Christopher Cui, Taiwei Shi, Mark O. Riedl, Neural Story Planning
Li Zhang, Peter Jansen, Tianyi Zhang, Peter Clark, Chris Callison-Burch, Niket Tandon, PDDLEGO: Iterative Planning in Textual Environments
Cassie Huang, Li Zhang, On the Limit of Language Models as Planning Formalizers
Academic Papers:
Pradyumna Tambwekar, Murtaza Dhuliawala, Lara J. Martin, Animesh Mehta, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reward Shaping
Amal Alabdulkarim, Winston Li, Lara J. Martin, Mark O. Riedl, Goal-Directed Story Generation: Augmenting Generative Language Models with Reinforcement Learning
Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark O. Riedl, Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
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
Anjie Zhu, Hongcai He, Yongjun Yang, Zetao Zheng, Jie Shao, Hands-Free: Action Abstraction With Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in Text-Based Games
Paper Presentations:
Academic Papers:
Tuesday, October 28, 2025 to Thursday, November 6, 2025
Academic Papers:
Robyn Speer, Joshua Chin, Catherine Havasi, ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge
Martha Palmer, Claire Bonial, Jena Hwang, VerbNet: Capturing English verb behavior, meaning and usage
Christiane Fellbaum, WordNet
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
Kathy Panton, Cynthia Matuszek, Douglas Lenat, Dave Schneider, Michael Witbrock, Nick Siegel, and Blake Shepard, Common Sense Reasoning – From Cyc to Intelligent Assistant
Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Joyce Y. Chai, Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Understanding: A Survey of Benchmarks, Resources, and Approaches
Gabor Angeli & Chris Manning, NaturalLI: Natural Logic Inference for Common Sense Reasoning
Yidan Sun, Qin Chao, Boyang Li, Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding
Supplemental Media:
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2 Common Sense leaderboards
Yejin Choi, Vered Shwartz, Maarten Sap, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth, ACL 2020 Commonsense Tutorial
David Gunning, Machine Common Sense Concept Paper
Academic Papers:
Marie-Laure Ryan, Fiction, Non-Factuals, and the Principle of Minimal Departure
Peter A. Jansen, A Systematic Survey of Text Worlds as Embodied Natural Language Environments
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
Matthew Hausknecht, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan, Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure
Eric Zhou, Shreyas Basavatia, Moontashir Siam, Zexin Chen, Mark O. Riedl, STORY2GAME: Generating (Almost) Everything in an Interactive Fiction Game
Academic Papers:
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
Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Aditya Kalyanpur, Lori Moon, David Buchanan, Lauren Berkowitz, Or Biran, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations
Zhongyang Li, Xiao Ding, Ting Liu, J. Edward Hu, Benjamin Van Durme, Guided Generation of Cause and Effect
Peter Clark, Bhavana Dalvi, Niket Tandon, What Happened? Leveraging VerbNet to Predict the Effects of Actions in Procedural Text
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
Academic Papers:
Yu Zhu, Rong Pan, Simple Contrastive Learning with Knowledge Graphs for Story Generation
Xiangyu Peng, Kaige Xie, Amal Alabdulkarim, Harshith Kayam, Samihan Dani, Mark Riedl, Guiding Neural Story Generation with Reader Models
Chenkai Sun, Tie Xu, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji, Incorporating Task-specific Concept Knowledge into Script Learning
Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds
László von Kacsoh, Robin Horst, Ralf Dörner, From Stat Block to Tabletop: A First-Order Logic Framework for Authoring Immersive RPG Combat Encounters
Shanshan Huang, Kenny Q. Zhu, Qianzi Liao, Libin Shen, Yinggong Zhao, Enhanced Story Representation by ConceptNet for Predicting Story Endings
Paper Presentations:
Academic Papers:
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 to Tuesday, November 25, 2025
No homework for this module.
Academic Papers:
Alex Rudnicky, Xu Wei, An agenda-based dialog management architecture for spoken language systems
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
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
Supplemental Media:
Jacob Eisenstein, NLP Chapter 19.3: Dialogue
Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Chapter 25: Conversation and its Structure
Academic Papers:
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
Wai Man Si, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark O. Riedl, Telling Stories through Multi-User Dialogue by Modeling Character Relations
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
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
Anvesh Rao Vijjini, Faeze Brahman, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generation
Academic Papers:
Ke Ji, Yixin Lian, Linxu Li, Jingsheng Gao, Weiyuan Li, Bin Dai, Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs’ Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning
Seungwon Lim, Seungbeen Lee, Dongjun Min, Youngjae Yu, Persona Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Persona Traits on Agents in Text-Based Games
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
Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou, Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment
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
Academic Papers:
Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds
Andrew Zhu, Evan Osgood, Chris Callison-Burch, First Steps Towards Overhearing LLM Agents: A Case Study With Dungeons & Dragons Gameplay
Andrew Zhu, Lara J. Martin, Andrew Head, Chris Callison-Burch, CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters’ Assistants
Piotr Mirowski, Kory W. Mathewson, Jaylen Pittman, Richard Evans, Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: Evaluation by Industry Professionals
Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, Emily Reif, Daphne Ippolito, Wordcraft: story writing with large language models
Ben Samuel, James Ryan, Adam J. Summerville, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Bad News: An Experiment in Computationally Assisted Performance
Paper Presentations:
Academic Papers:
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 to Tuesday, December 9, 2025
No homework for this module.
Academic Papers:
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
Dingyi Yang, Qin Jin, What Matters in Evaluating Book-Length Stories? A Systematic Study of Long Story Evaluation
Yi Wang, Max Kreminski, Can LLMs Generate Good Stories? Insights and Challenges from a Narrative Planning Perspective
Hannah Rashkin, Elizabeth Clark, Fantine Huot, Mirella Lapata, Help Me Write a Story: Evaluating LLMs’ Ability to Generate Writing Feedback
Academic Papers: