Lara J. Martin

504 Followers
341 Following
153 Posts

Assistant Professor at UMBC working on story generation, #AAC, and an #AI #DnD dungeon master.
♿💗💜💙♾️

Here's more hashtags:
#NLP #NLProc #NLG #CogSci #speech #ComputationalCreativity

Websitehttps://laramartin.net
Pronounsshe/they

I'm proud to be leaving a humble contribution to UPenn's artificial-intelligence-class.org taught by @ccb, a new homework I developed on logical inference and knowledge-based agents.

It is built upon an original game by @laramar in which R2-D2 is trying to save Luke Skywalker from a cave system. There are all sorts of obstacles in the caves, like pits, walls, and a monster called the Wampa.

Since it is dark in the caves, R2 can't see whether an adjacent room is safe...

https://resonance.tools/2024/12/wampa-world/

Wampa World

An Assignment on Logical Inference Algorithms & Knowledge-Based Agents

resonance.tools

IEEE Transaction on Games (ToG) is having a special issue on #LLMs and #Games, which I am a guest editor for! Papers are due December 1!
More information here: https://transactions.games/special-issue/special-issue-on-large-language-models-and-games

#ChatGPT #procgen

Special Issue on Large Language Models and Games | IEEE Transactions on Games

Wow. I just had a 10-year-old paper of mine get its first citation. I guess someone read it after all! 🙏

Happy to share that I just put our D&D FIREBALL (https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.229/) data up on HuggingFace🤗!
https://huggingface.co/datasets/lara-martin/FIREBALL
It's a cool dataset that I'd love to see more people using.

It contains structured state information and narrative to help make D&D-playing AI!

FIREBALL: A Dataset of Dungeons and Dragons Actual-Play with Structured Game State Information

Andrew Zhu, Karmanya Aggarwal, Alexander Feng, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

ACL Anthology

Very excited to finally put out my work on #AAC (communication accessibility) devices for #AutisticAdults. Working with masters student Malathy Nagalakshmi during my postdoc at Penn, we did a deep dive into how AAC can be improved from both society & technology/#NLProc perspectives.

You can find the preprint here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17730

Bridging the Social & Technical Divide in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Applications for Autistic Adults

Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are being used more frequently to improve high-tech Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), but many of these techniques are integrated without the inclusion of the users' perspectives. Autistic adults are particularly neglected in the design of AAC tools. We conducted in-depth interviews with 12 autistic adults to find the pain points of current AAC and determine what technological advances they might find helpful. We found that in addition to technological issues, there are many societal issues as well. We found 9 different categories of themes from our interviews: input flexibility, output flexibility, selecting or adapting AAC for a good fit, when to start or swap AAC, benefits, access as an adult, stumbling blocks for continued use, social concerns, and control of communication. In this paper, we go through these categories in depth and then suggest possible guidelines for developers, NLP researchers, and policy makers.

arXiv.org
Relatedly: If you are a UMBC student or have recently been admitted to UMBC, I will be teaching a special topics course on the subject!
Here's the website from a previous iteration of the course: https://interactive-fiction-class.org/2022/
CIS 700-001 - Interactive Fiction and Text Generation - University of Pennsylvania

Do you do AI research in story generation or interactive fiction playing generation? Do you have a cool narrative system that you want to show off but don't know how to?
Submit to the Wordplay Workshop @ ACL 2024!
https://wordplay-workshop.github.io/

#acl2024nlp #interactivefiction #nlproc #chatgpt

/overview

Official website for the Wordplay Workshop at EMNLP 2025.

Wordplay: When Language Meets Games (EMNLP 2025 Workshop)
Looking for a tenure-track faculty position in CS? UMBC's CSEE department is hiring!! https://apply.interfolio.com/133579
UMBC is an amazing school that is actually dedicated to an inclusive culture that supports diversity. Plus, we became an R1 last year, so exciting things are happening!
#academicmastodon #JobPosting
Apply - Interfolio

In a couple weeks (on 10/4 to be exact), I'll be giving a talk at UMD's CLIP colloquium! I'm super excited to visit UMBC's sister school near DC and meet all the great faculty (& future collaborators?!) there. More details to come.
.@laramar continues to rock when it comes to LMs and D&D https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/19/chatgpt_dnd_dm/
Hallucinating ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons

Magical models less a replacement for human DMs and more a familiar for GMs

The Register