Professor Lara Martin an organizer of NLP and Games workshop

UMBC Professor Lara Martin is one of the organizers of the Wordplay: When Language Meets Games workshop, which will be held at the annual Association of Computational Linguistics conference in Bangkok, Thailand, on August 16, 2024.

The workshop will focus on exploring the utility of interactive narratives, think everything from classic text-adventures like Zork to modern Twine games, to fill a role as the learning environments of choice for language-based tasks including but not limited to storytelling. Previous iterations of this workshop took place successfully, with hundreds of attendees at NeurIPS 2018, NeurIPS 2020, and NAACL 2022. Since then, the community of people working in this area has rapidly increased. 

This workshop aims to be a centralized place where all researchers involved across many fields can interact and learn from each other. Furthermore, it will act as a showcase to the broader NLP/RL/Game communities on interactive narrative’s place as a learning environment. The program will feature a collection of invited talks in addition to contributed talks and posters from each of these sections of the interactive narrative community and the wider natural language processing and reinforcement learning communities.