CIS 700 - Lectures

The lecture schedule will be updated as the term progresses. You can find more details under the Modules tab.

Date	Lecture Topic	Activity	Academic Papers	Supplemental Media	Homework Due
Thu, Jan 13, 2022	Intro to the class, Interactive Fiction, and Automated Story Generation (Module 0) [slides] [video]	Play a text adventure game	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	Various, Play some text-based games on Itch.io Jason Scott, GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary Chris Ainsley/adventuron.io, Video Tutorial - Beginners Guide To Coding An Illustrated Text Adventure Game Jared Sorensen, Action Castle at PAX East 2011 Mark Riedl, An Introduction to AI Story Generation H2G2.com, How to Make a Text-Based Adventure: Commands and Parser
Mon, Jan 17, 2022					HW1: Build a Text-Adventure Game (5%)
Tue, Jan 18, 2022	Neural Language Models + Transformers (Module 1) [slides] [video] by Daphne Ippolito		Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, [GPT-2 paper] Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, [Transformer paper] Attention is All You Need Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le, Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks Alex Graves, Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks	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
Thu, Jan 20, 2022	Transformers, Continued (Module 1) [slides] [video] by Daphne Ippolito	Create Data for Intent Detection	Ari Holtzman, Jan Buys, Li Du, Maxwell Forbes, Yejin Choi, The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, Jeffrey Dean, [word2vec paper] Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space 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	Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, A Bit of Fry & Laurie: Concerning Language Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Chapter 6: Vector Semantics and Embeddings
Tue, Jan 25, 2022	Pretraining/Prompting (Module 1) [video]	Intent Determination with GPT-3	Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, et al., Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3 paper) 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
Tue, Jan 25, 2022	Course Selection Period ends
Thu, Jan 27, 2022	Neural Story Generation + Module 1 Paper Presentations (Module 1) [slides] [video]		Angela Fan, Mike Lewis, Yann Dauphin, Hierarchical Neural Story Generation Abigail See, Aneesh Pappu, Rohun Saxena, Akhila Yerukola, Christopher D. Manning, Do Massively Pretrained Language Models Make Better Storytellers? Roy Schwartz, Jesse Dodge, Noah A. Smith, Oren Etzioni, Green AI	Nick Walton/Latitude, AI Dungeon (game)
Mon, Jan 31, 2022					HW2: Generating Descriptions (10%)
Tue, Feb 1, 2022	Scripts and Events (Module 2) [slides] [video]	Make Your Own Mini Script	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? Marie-Laure Ryan, Fiction, Non-Factuals, and the Principle of Minimal Departure
Thu, Feb 3, 2022	Understanding Procedures (Module 2) [slides] [video] by Harry Li Zhang and Veronica Qing Lyu		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
Tue, Feb 8, 2022	Guided Story Generation (Module 2) [slides] [video]		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 Pradyumna Tambwekar, Murtaza Dhuliawala, Lara J. Martin, Animesh Mehta, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reward Shaping Shanshan Huang, Kenny Q. Zhu, Qianzi Liao, Libin Shen, Yinggong Zhao, Enhanced Story Representation by ConceptNet for Predicting Story Endings 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
Thu, Feb 10, 2022	Story Ending Prediction (Story Cloze Test) + Module 2 Paper Presentations (Module 2) [slides] [video]
Tue, Feb 15, 2022					HW3: Plot Graph Generation HW (10%)
Tue, Feb 15, 2022	Search (Module 3) [slides] [video]	Search Algorithms for Action Castle		Peter Norvig and Stuart J. Russell, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Chapter 3
Thu, Feb 17, 2022	Classical Planning (Module 3) [slides] [video]	Planning and PDDL		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
Mon, Feb 21, 2022					Paper Summaries 1
Mon, Feb 21, 2022	Drop Period ends
Tue, Feb 22, 2022	Story Planning + Drama Management (Module 3) [slides] [video] by Stephen G. Ware		Michael Lebowitz, Story-Telling as Planning and Learning 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	Narrative Intelligence Lab at the University of Kentucky, Camelot Virtual Environment
Thu, Feb 24, 2022	Façade Playthrough + Module 3 Paper Presentations (Module 3) [video]		Md Sultan Al Nahian, Spencer Frazier, Mark Riedl, Brent Harrison, Learning Norms from Stories: A Prior for Value Aligned Agents Markus Eger, Kory W. Mathewson, dAIrector: Automatic Story Beat Generation through Knowledge Synthesis Haoyu Wang, Muhao Chen, Hongming Zhang, Dan Roth, Joint Constrained Learning for Event-Event Relation Extraction	Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Façade Michael S. Gentry, Anchorhead William Wallace Cook, PLOTTO: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction
Tue, Mar 1, 2022	Commonsense Reasoning (Module 4) [slides] [video]		David Gunning, Machine Common Sense Concept Paper 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 Yejin Choi, Vered Shwartz, Maarten Sap, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth, ACL 2020 Commonsense Tutorial Gabor Angeli and Chris Manning, NaturalLI: Natural Logic Inference for Common Sense Reasoning	Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2 Common Sense leaderboards
Thu, Mar 3, 2022	Knowledge Representations + Schemata (Module 4) [slides] [video]	WordNet Schemas	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 Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Aditya Kalyanpur, Lori Moon, David Buchanan, Lauren Berkowitz, Or Biran, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations 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 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 Lei Shi and Rada Mihalcea, Putting Pieces Together: Combining FrameNet, VerbNet and WordNet for Robust Semantic Parsing		HW4 Planning: Convert WikiHow to PDDL (10%)
Mon, Mar 7, 2022					Paper Summaries 2
Tue, Mar 8, 2022	No class (Spring Break)
Thu, Mar 10, 2022	No class (Spring Break)
Tue, Mar 15, 2022	Midsemester Recap + Ontologies (Module 4) [slides] [video] by Susan Brown		Susan Brown, Claire Bonial, Leo Obrst, Martha Palmer, The Rich Event Ontology
Wed, Mar 16, 2022					Final Project Milestone 1: Proposal + Lightning Talk (5%)
Thu, Mar 17, 2022	Final Project Lightning Talks
Fri, Mar 18, 2022	Grade Type Change Deadline
Tue, Mar 22, 2022	Module 4 Paper Presentations (Module 4) [video]		Manaal Faruqui, Jesse Dodge, Sujay K. Jauhar, Chris Dyer, Eduard Hovy, Noah A. Smith, Retrofitting Word Vectors to Semantic Lexicons	Samuel R. Bowman, Gabor Angeli, Christopher Potts, and Christopher D. Manning, Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) Corpus
Thu, Mar 24, 2022	Intro to Dialogue + Dialogue for Interactive Fiction (Module 5) [slides] [video]	Train GPT-3 to Perform Dialogue for NPCs	Iulian V. Serban, Alessandro Sordoni, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, Joelle Pineau, Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models Jiwei Li, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Jianfeng Gao, Bill Dolan, A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, A Neural Conversational Model Yizhe Zhang, Siqi Sun, Michel Galley, Yen-Chun Chen, Chris Brockett, Xiang Gao, Jianfeng Gao, Jingjing Liu, Bill Dolan, DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation 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
Fri, Mar 25, 2022					HW5 Schemas: COMET-ATOMIC Schema (10%)
Mon, Mar 28, 2022	Last day to withdraw from a course
Tue, Mar 29, 2022	Character-Based Generation (Module 5) [video]	Characters and Quests	Annie Louis, Charles Sutton, Deep Dungeons and Dragons: Learning Character-Action Interactions from Role-Playing Game Transcripts Maarten Sap, Marcella Cindy Prasettio, Ari Holtzman, Hannah Rashkin, Yejin Choi, Connotation Frames of Power and Agency in Modern Films James Ryan, Curating Simulated Storyworlds
Thu, Mar 31, 2022	Module 5 Paper Presentations (Module 5) [video]		Stephen Roller, Emily Dinan, Naman Goyal, Da Ju, Mary Williamson, Yinhan Liu, Jing Xu, Myle Ott, Eric Michael Smith, Y-Lan Boureau, Jason Weston, Recipes for Building an Open-Domain Chatbot Daniel Adiwardana, Minh-Thang Luong, David R. So, Jamie Hall, Noah Fiedel, Romal Thoppilan, Zi Yang, Apoorv Kulshreshtha, Gaurav Nemade, Yifeng Lu, Quoc V. Le, Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot Joao Sedoc, Daphne Ippolito, Arun Kirubarajan, Jai Thirani, Lyle Ungar, Chris Callison-Burch, ChatEval: A Tool for Chatbot Evaluation
Fri, Apr 1, 2022					Paper Summaries 3
Mon, Apr 4, 2022					Final Project Milestone 2: Progress Report (Lit Review & Baselines) (5%)
Tue, Apr 5, 2022	Reinforcement Learning for Playing Interactive Fiction (Module 6) [slides] [video] by Prithviraj (Raj) Ammanabrolu		Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark Riedl, Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Ethan Tien, Zhaochen Luo, Mark O. Riedl, How to Avoid Being Eaten by a Grue: Structured Exploration Strategies for Textual Worlds Karthik Narasimhan, Tejas Kulkarni, Regina Barzilay, Language Understanding for Text-based Games Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Ji He, Jianshu Chen, Xiaodong He, Jianfeng Gao, Lihong Li, Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Natural Language Action Space Tom Zahavy, Matan Haroush, Nadav Merlis, Daniel J. Mankowitz, Shie Mannor, Learn What Not to Learn: Action Elimination with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Thu, Apr 7, 2022	Mixed Methods (Module 6) [slides] [video]		Lara J. Martin, Neurosymbolic automated story generation [thesis]
Mon, Apr 11, 2022					HW6 Dialog: Alexa Action-Castle (10%)
Tue, Apr 12, 2022	Theory of Mind and Intent in Procedural Agents (Module 6) [slides] [video] by Jonathan May		Hyundong Cho and Jonathan May, Grounding Conversations with Improvised Dialogues Xusen Yin, Ralph Weischedel, Jonathan May, Learning to Generalize for Sequential Decision Making Boyd Branch, Piotr Mirowski, Kory W. Mathewson, Collaborative Storytelling with Human Actors and AI Narrators Brian Magerko, Waleed Manzoul, Mark Riedl, Allan Baumer, Daniel Fuller, Kurt Luther, Celia Pearce, An empirical study of cognition and theatrical improvisation Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, and Mark O. Riedl, Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds
Thu, Apr 14, 2022	Story Evaluation + Module 6 Paper Presentations (Module 6) [slides] [video] by Elizabeth Clark		Asli Celikyilmaz, Elizabeth Clark, Jianfeng Gao, Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey Elizabeth Clark, Tal August, Sofia Serrano, Nikita Haduong, Suchin Gururangan, Noah A. Smith, All That's 'Human' Is Not Gold: Evaluating Human Evaluation of Generated Text Sebastian Gehrmann, Elizabeth Clark, Thibault Sellam, Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text Christopher Purdy, Xinyu Wang, Larry He, Mark Riedl, Predicting Generated Story Quality with Quantitative Measures Morteza Behrooz, Justus Robertson, Arnav Jhala, Story Quality as a Matter of Perception: Using Word Embeddings to Estimate Cognitive Interest Elizabeth Clark, Noah A. Smith, Choose Your Own Adventure: Paired Suggestions in Collaborative Writing for Evaluating Story Generation Models Chin-Yew Lin, ROUGE: A Package for Automatic Evaluation of Summaries Matt J. Kusner, Yu Sun, Nicholas I. Kolkin, Kilian Q. Weinberger, From Word Embeddings To Document Distances Tianyi Zhang, Varsha Kishore, Felix Wu, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Yoav Artzi, BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT Tatsunori B. Hashimoto, Hugh Zhang, Percy Liang, Unifying Human and Statistical Evaluation for Natural Language Generation Yaoming Zhu, Sidi Lu, Lei Zheng, Jiaxian Guo, Weinan Zhang, Jun Wang, Yong Yu, Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Models Thibault Sellam, Dipanjan Das, Ankur Parikh, BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation Jian Guan, Minlie Huang, UNION: An Unreferenced Metric for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation David M. Howcroft, et al., Twenty Years of Confusion in Human Evaluation: NLG Needs Evaluation Sheets and Standardised Definitions Hannah Rashkin, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yejin Choi, Jianfeng Gao, PlotMachines: Outline-Conditioned Generation with Dynamic Plot State Tracking Elizabeth Clark, Anne Spencer Ross, Chenhao Tan, Yangfeng Ji, Noah A. Smith, Creative Writing with a Machine in the Loop: Case Studies on Slogans and Stories Reid Swanson, Andrew S. Gordon, Say Anything: Using Textual Case-Based Reasoning to Enable Open-Domain Interactive Storytelling Nader Akoury, Shufan Wang, Josh Whiting, Stephen Hood, Nanyun Peng, Mohit Iyyer, STORIUM: A Dataset and Evaluation Platform for Machine-in-the-Loop Story Generation Mina Lee, Percy Liang, Qian Yang, CoAuthor: Designing a Human-AI Collaborative Writing Dataset for Exploring Language Model Capabilities
Mon, Apr 18, 2022					Final Project Milestone 3: Final Report Draft (5%)
Mon, Apr 18, 2022					Paper Summaries 4
Tue, Apr 19, 2022	Visual Storytelling (Module 6) [slides] [video] by Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang		Chi-Yang Hsu, Yun-Wei Chu, Tsai-Lun Yang, Ting-Hao Huang, Lun-Wei Ku, Stretch-VST: Getting Flexible With Visual Stories Chi-Yang Hsu, Yun-Wei Chu, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang, Lun-Wei Ku, Plot and Rework: Modeling Storylines for Visual Storytelling Mohit Iyyer, Varun Manjunatha, Anupam Guha, Yogarshi Vyas, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Hal Daume III, Larry S. Davis, The Amazing Mysteries of the Gutter: Drawing Inferences Between Panels in Comic Book Narratives Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Francis Ferraro, Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Ishan Misra, Aishwarya Agrawal, Jacob Devlin, Ross Girshick, Xiaodong He, Pushmeet Kohli, Dhruv Batra, C. Lawrence Zitnick, Devi Parikh, Lucy Vanderwende, Michel Galley, and Margaret Mitchell, Visual Storytelling Yukun Zhu, Ryan Kiros, Richard Zemel, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Raquel Urtasun, Antonio Torralba, and Sanja Fidler, Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books
Thu, Apr 21, 2022	Final Project In-Class Help
Mon, Apr 25, 2022					Final Project Milestone 4: Final Report (20%) Video Presentation Submission Due
Tue, Apr 26, 2022	Final Project Presentations