Microblog

While streaming Populous (part 2), I discover that unit pathfinding in an RTS game from the 90s can be PRETTY FREAKING bad. AI in games has come a long way.

Tonight at 20:00 I stream the second installment of my career as a shamanistic god. Bring your own locusts and come hang out in my twitch chat. ;) twitch.tv/jd7h

It was as fun as I remembered, especially when you smite enemy warriors with LIGHTNING!

TIL Snowclones database, a great source of inspiration for builders of text generators. Contains phrases like "have X will travel", "X is the new Y" and "this is your brain on X". snowclones.org/index/

So, any thoughts? :)

Anyone looking for a PhD position that combines natural language generation and explainable AI? There's 11 positions available in the NL4XAI project. One of the positions is at @HMIutwente!
More info here: nl4xai.eu/vacancies/

Me, after my end-of-year bonus has arrived

I've added 3 new recipes to my (Dutch language) cookbook: for boerenkool, vegan minestrone and bolognese a la papa. :) You can read them at mosterdgeel.nl!

I picked it up at gog.com for EUR1.39. Absolute steal! :D

It was as fun as I remembered, especially when you smite enemy warriors with LIGHTNING!

Tonight at 20:00 I'll stream Populous: The Beginning (1998), an RTS I used to play when I was a kid. See you then! twitch.tv/jd7h

I'm using the textrnn library to generate book titles. I've trained a neural network on my GoodReads library, i.e. a mix of Dutch and English books. After 40 epochs (training passes) it generates things that sound like something from Lewis Caroll's Jabberwocky.

I'm just so grateful for people like @minimaxir, @JanelleCShane, and @GalaxyKate, who take time to write blog posts, opensource libraries and notebooks with well-documented code. You are bringing creative computing to the masses and I love it. <3

This could be one of our (generated, extra-punny) headlines: Navy Officer Likes to Rock Boat. @lorgatti

You can look at this page from the university of utrecht: uu.nl/en/organisatio…
The three columns at the bottom contain the names of useful agencies. Good luck!

Tips for academics who want to get better at making general audience videos and sharing cool info about their research field. @Norsebysw's channel is a great example of science communication done right.

Check out these great techie t-shirt designs by @m_ou_se! They're much better than the average nerd shirt -- fewer stereotypes, more colours! We need more of this type of shirts. ✨

I feel like playing a slow-paced game tonight, so at 20:00 (UTC+1) I'll stream narrative game Far From Noise (2017), which came recommended by @studioanisa. Feel free to join me in the chat or just lurk around if you're curious about this game. twitch.tv/jd7h

Where can I read more about this design (pattern)? I love it!

Is your code/project online anywhere? I have students working on procedural text generation for a science fiction game and I'm collecting cool examples + sources of inspiration.

Unfortunately, the website with documentation seems offline? :/

I need some #NLproc advice! I have a corpus of dialogue (unannotated raw text) and I want to automatically generate a grammar that describes the sentences in these dialogues. The grammar will be used for generating similar dialogue. What open source tools are available for this?

Check out @GaspGallery for customizable museum-quality prints of procedural art. I found this via the wonderful Seeds zine of #procjam.

Top 6 teaser:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Kanban
Harry Potter and the Room of Unclear Requirements
Race Condition Harry Potter and the
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Vim
Harry Potter and the Chamber of NullPointerExceptions
Harry Potter and the unexpected ":" on line 43.

I scraped 3000+ replies to this tweet of @iamdevloper and made a top 50. :) Results and write-up here: judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/harr…

And the most popular technical Harry Potter titles:
Harry Potter and the Useless Use of Cat
Harry Potter and the Bashed Bin of Unix
Harry Potter and the Config of WebPack
Harry Potter and the HollowsHunter
Harry Potter and the Image Pull Policy
Harry Potter and the hollow of vim

Procedural traditional art!

That is one sexy phd thesis cover.

For those who saw "No, that an X. A Mandalorian is a Y." meme in their timeline, here is a back-of-an-envelope top-10:

50 mandoline
53 mandate
65 manticore
74 mandala
86 mitochondria
113 delorean
124 mandible
124 mandrake
187 mandarin
298 mandolin

Hoard all the books! There is no shame.

So what DOES NLP need?
- fairness & accountability
- transferring knowledge across domains
- usable and accessible symbolic representations
- techniques for dealing with implicit information ("missing elements") in text
- modeling should be a process instead of a one-shot effort

Great talk by @yoavgo, in which he summarizes NLP research in 10 minutes, and then discusses what (applied) NLP still needs.
youtube.com/watch?v=e12dan… #nlproc

Tonight at 20:00 (UTC+1) I'll stream a bit of House Flipper on my twitch channel. Feel free to join if you want to see how I change a fuse.

That’s awesome. Thanks for the update! :)

@mtrc Your link [you might want to do so] on cutgarnetgames.itch.io/condition-unkn… links to the Steam page of the Obra Dinn game. I think this is not the right URL?

You had me at "generative forensics".

Titles for new D&D source books? :D

@ieee_cog @diego_pliebana Can you tell me where we can find the videos that were made during the conference? I'd love to (re)watch the keynotes.

Yes! The research papers that I like best are ones that emphasize opensource code, community adoption, etc. -- and these papers are often written bij artist-scientists. ;)

I am trying to incorporate this insight into my PhD research by focusing on low-cost high-gain text generation methods for games. Game devs should be able to use new technology in practice, otherwise it's pointless.

Making tea, eating comfort food and watching an episode of Downton Abbey are already on the list. ;)

This week I'm moving to a new apartment. Any ideas for fun things I could do to make this new house my home?

The last session was in English already because there are now apparently people from Sweden watching. :') So yeah, streaming w/ mic will be in English from now on.

Great! I love casual narrative indie games! I'm buying this one so I can play it on my livestream. :)

I can appreciate their pragmatism. Wiki's can be nice for getting relational data, but if you only need the text, why would you spend extra time on data cleaning if you can get it from a single webpage with wget?

The students found that one too, but "wiki's are harder to scrape than The Imperial Library".

One of my students told me about The Imperial Library website, on which you can find the text of all in-game books from The Elder Scrolls. Handy for researchers looking for video game text datasets. ;) imperial-library.info/books/all/by-c… #nlproc #procgen

I LOVE how open access seems to be the norm within both Natural Language Generation (Thanks ACL!) and games research. Found this gem today: link.springer.com/article/10.100…

My playthrough of indie narrative game Old Man's Journey is now available on YouTube. Commentary is in Dutch. Enjoy! youtu.be/-nfNS54FDw4

A new extra-spoopy shirt design! I created this one for a lover of obscure music genres like DEATH JAZZ. shop.spreadshirt.nl/meteoriet-desi…

I'm glad to see that NLP research is applied to infosec defense! I found this open access paper in the @aclanthology about building ElasticSearch queries for threat hunters using Natural Language Understanding. aclweb.org/anthology/W19-…

- copy your butt and feet with the Xerox
- steal the red stapler
- break the build
- take part in a conference call
- lock the CEO out of their office

I added an English translation of my city guide for Nijmegen (NL) to my blog. :) judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/city…

Thanks to @khiettruong and @ChristophSalge for proofreading and giving useful comments. :)

New blogpost: "Twitter guide for researchers", in which I explain how I get information about my research field(s) by using Twitter lists.
judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/twit… #AcademicTwitter

Superhappy with my vintage streaming overlay (including tv-glare and interfering stripes). Thanks for joining if you were active in the chat. Next week Thursday I'm back for the final part of Untitled Goose Game at 20:00 (UTC+2).

This Thursday I'll stream part B, starting at 20:00 (UTC+2). Come join me as a I wreak havoc as a member of the Terror Goose Army.

Tonight I'll be streaming Untitled Goose Game on my Twitch channel. Feel free to join in if you (like me) want to know what the fuss is all about. twitch.tv/jd7h

Definitely. I've participated in NaNoWriMo (50k words in 30 days) multiple times, and churning out words is never a problem. Coherent and concise research plans, however...

Hi! I'm a researcher! It's taken me a month to write down my research plans for the coming two years. That plan is 1936 words long.

Apparently, my writing speed is 64 words/day.

Thankfully, we all know that "words written" is a meaningless measure of scientific productivity.

I really wanted a D&D-themed pride shirt with a rainbow of D20's, so here we are. For sale in my webshop, starting today! :) 🏳️‍🌈 shop.spreadshirt.nl/meteoriet-desi…

Yup! But I have recordings of everything, so after I figure out a way to edit them properly I will put them on YT.

Tonight I'll be streaming Untitled Goose Game on my Twitch channel. Feel free to join in if you (like me) want to know what the fuss is all about. twitch.tv/jd7h

@BotGranny I have some eggs left in my fridge, what should I make?

@QuestsEveryday which I remember from the fall

@QuestsEveryday There is so much at stake

There is so much at stake

@yannic_ut Should I invest in your company, dearest?

Bot of the Month: @softlandscapes generates beautiful landscapes using Tracery-generated SVGs. Mountains and gradients are randomly picked.

"did u know ima graphic designer 2"🤓

Tonight at 20:00 (18:00 UTC) I stream the second part of the indie narrative game Old Man's Journey. Feel free to tune in! Even if you don't speak Dutch, you can look at the wonderful in-game art or listen to the soundtrack. twitch.tv/jd7h

The iTech lecture series on Twitter bots starts tomorrow. I'm curious to see what kind of bots the students will build.

I spent some time this afternoon figuring out how Twitch + OBS Studio works, and afterwards did a small 60 minute try-out stream of the game Old Man Journey (indie narrative game) -- lots of fun. Def more streams to come at twitch.tv/jd7h!

I could watch the creation of procedural art all day.

The Dungeon Master's emergency supplies shelf! #critters

My headline generator Churnalist is open-source! The repository also includes the source for the demo I showed at IEEE COG, which means you can now run it locally and try it out yourself! github.com/jd7h/churnalist

If you're into NLP/NLG and not reading @EhudReiter's blog yet -- please start doing so! The blog posts are written in accessible language (i.e. not in Academese) and discuss important issues in NLG-related R&D. Example: ehudreiter.com/2019/08/01/do-… #NLProc

Remember people, if you have a project you are planning to opensource, do it this month! Next month is #Hacktoberfest2019 which is the perfect opportunity to invite the open source community to contribute to your project.

My @HMIutwente colleague Michel is now writing conference reports as well! Check out his blog if you're into affective computing and emotions.

"Waar NLP nog erg veel moeite mee heeft is de alledaagse werkelijkheid die bij mensen vanzelfsprekend is."
fd.nl/futures/131446…

Today was @HMIutwente Demo Day to get our students excited for the various research topics! Here I am showcasing Churnalist and a #nanogenmo novel to demo creative text generation.

Great website by @JasperRLZ for exploring game worlds. Perfect for those who miss flying around as a seagull in The Wind Waker. 😍 noclip.website/#zww/Room11.arc

What can we (academics) do to solve the communication problem you describe?

The collective noun for 'bots' is 'assemblage'. Other cool options: singularity, array, cluster, circuit. Although if we're talking text generating Twitter bots, 'babble' or 'broadcast' might also be good options. ackdigital.com/botjunkie/page…

The official ICCC2020 of @iccc_conf is in Coimbra, Portugal.

I forgot to mention the taskforce on measuring player experience, by @OccupyMath and @CIGbalance. It has been added to the blogpost now. :)

The official website for the International Conference on Computational Creativity is here: computationalcreativity.net/iccc20/

Oh no! Predatory conference organisation WASET is using the ICCC name: waset.org/conference/202…. :( Be careful, computational creativity researchers, this is NOT the official conference by @iccc_conf!

Writing technical books seems to be a weird mix of writing for free for exposure (like blogging) and writing on commission. This article describes the process for publishing such a book with O'Reilly: medium.com/@rothgar/the-e…

Here you go: judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/conf…

New blog: I finished my #COG2019 conference report! judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/conf…
Featuring research and talks by @emshort, @drtowerstein, @wallnergue, @mtrc, @amidos2006, @j1mco and many others. :) @cog2019ieee

Your office pet looks like mine! twitter.com/jd7h/status/10…

Next month, I will record a short lecture video of about 5 minutes, and I'm taking suggestions for the topic! Is there anything particular (related to text generation, text gen for games, computational creativity, etc.) you would like to see explained in a 5-minute video?

This is today!

Next week, there will be a sale in my tshirt webshop! With code ANYTHING20 you'll get 20% off everything on September 4 and 5. :) meteorietdesign.nl/shop

My webshop now contains two t-shirt designs about NLG: "Mother of Bots" and "Natural Language Generator". Get them here: meteorietdesign.nl/shop

The results (mostly lots of post-its with ideas for future research) of the workshop on Deep Learning and Computational Creativity at #ICCC2019 have been published online by the workshop organisers. Get your scans here: github.com/jer-hayes/ICCC… @iccc_conf

There's a new #infosec themed shirt in my t-shirt shop: an ode to one of the best hacker movies from the 90s: Sneakers! shop.spreadshirt.nl/meteoriet-desi…

@cog2019ieee Do you have an ETA for the talk recordings, and where will they be published? #COG19

I added two new designs to my tshirt webshop: Panda Rhei and Outdoor metal.

Next week, there will be a sale in my tshirt webshop! With code ANYTHING20 you'll get 20% off everything on September 4 and 5. :) meteorietdesign.nl/shop

Nieuw recept op Mosterdgeel: salmorejo (koude Spaanse tomatensoep) -- net zoiets als gazpacho, maar dan beter! mosterdgeel.nl/salmorejo/

I will consider it now that you asked. :)

Need a bit more positivity in your Twitter timeline? Here is a list of self-care bots: twitter.com/clairebearian/…

I WISH TO HARM THE MELODY MACHINE

This is related to the “tricks” for coherence I mention in my paper about coherent story generation. If you prepare the player (=reader) by providing a plausible and framing context for generated language, they will appreciate it more.

- NPC moods and motives justify them refusing to go off-topic
- NPCs that are motivated to work with you have a reason to hint to you
- Familiar social contexts provide a really useful framework as well

My fav slide from @emshort’s keynoteat #COG2019 was about how you can use context to frame what the player should say in a game with natural language input:

- thriller/high pressure scenes disallow exploration
- mystery encourages targeted exploration

1/

Talking about my headline generator during the demo session of #cog2019 — I spent over 2 hours in a session that was planned to last 30 mins, so that’s good right?

I thought the “have you considered therapy for your fear of flying” remark particularly bad and unrespectful to the speaker.

The Churnalist demo is all set up! Drop by if you want to talk text generation for games, or discuss the challenges of writing flavour text. #cog2019

The keynote speakers are great, but we need less troll questions during the Q&A sessions at #cog2019. Be excellent to each other and stick to the contents of the talk.

Leftside, middle row, all the way to the left.

Creative Assembly is giving a talk about automated reports for analyzing (problems with) game AIs. Game devs should talk with infosec people about this, because both groups face the same challenge: there a ton of low-level log files and little time to find the problem. #COG2019

I love the tartan-ed robot!

Reminder, this is tomorrow! The demo session starts at 14:35. Full program here: ieee-cog.org/assets/program… #CoG2019 @cog2019ieee.

I submitted a demo paper about Churnalist to the IEEE Conference on Games (COG) 2019, which was accepted. I’ll be demonstrating my headline generator in London (UK) at the industry day (free entrance!) on August 20. Be sure to come and say hi of you’re in the neighbourhood!

Nieuw recept op Mosterdgeel: Bobotie mosterdgeel.nl/bobotie/

Another gem in the category career advice by @b0rk. jvns.ca/blog/brag-docu…

There are online communities that reward empathy, kindness and good conversation instead of shock and moral outrage scientificamerican.com/article/the-te…

Remember people: the recommendation algorithms on the web are not engineered to send you to the best content. These algorithms are engineered to grab attention: to gather clicks, to sell stuff, and to keep you browsing.

@rajammanabrolu You mentioned a parrot in Sea of Thieves that uses text generation, but I can't find a reference to it anywhere. Can you point me to an example of this in the game?

Wow! I suddenly have more than 500 followers -- I think this has something to do with all my conference live-tweeting in the past few months? And you, dear followers, are here to read more about...

I’m writing a blogpost about how I use Twitter as a researcher. Coming soon!

Thanks Mike!

Now Zhai Fangzhou presents about attaining global coherence in neural story generation. Their approach uses scripts, or standardized sequences of events, and a story plan called ‘agenda’. #storynlp

Here is a list of functional structures, the elements of functional schemas.

This research has many possible applications:
- social media related classification tasks
- analyzing differences between storytelling in social media and elsewhere
- persuasive communication
- generating social media messages
#storynlp

Schemas reveal the subreddit community posting rules. Some subreddits are more factual, others center around personal experiences. Investigated subreddits: /r/green, /r/zerowaste and /r/environment. #storynlp

Examples of different reddit schemas. Most schemas seem to revolve around sharing news, facts or personal stories, and asking questions. #storynlp

Here is an example of a functional schema from a reddit post (photo 1) and a description of their pipeline (photo 2). Each post is interpreted as one narrative, each sentence is assigned to a functional structure.

Authors built an unsupervised pipeline to extract schemas from social media posts. Their approach was tested on reddit posts. It turned out that different reddit communities had different story schemas, so we can use schemas to distinguish between communities. #storynlp

Xinru Yan presents about using functional schemas to understand social media narratives. She opens with two different definitions of narrative: one focuses on related events, the other focuses on characters. #storynlp

After a short break, we continue with a talk about persona-based story generation by Khyathi Chandu. The goal is to incorporate (more) emotional expressiveness in the generated stories. #storynlp #acl2019

Part of the demo, which shows one storybook with Chinese audio and English subtitles. #storyNLP

Sentences are analyzed by the system for info about characters, actions and scenery (photo 1). This info gets turned into scene images using clip art (photo 2). #storynlp

Next up, Xiaoyu Qi from Microsoft talks about turning story text into a picture book with audio. #storynlp

Speaker @melissa_roem can be found on Twitter, it turns out. Sorry for not mentioning it earlier.

Remarks on evaluating AI assisted writing:
- don’t separate the output from the human computer interaction
- ratings based evaluation can be problematic for humans as it’s hard to explain why they (don’t) like output
- consider using implicit feedback for evaluation

#storynlp

As an example, MR shows combinations of human authoring and GPT2 output. AI writing is all over the place: makes huge jumps in amount of detail, from high level narrative to specific dialogue, whereas human writing is much more stable. #storynlp

At #iccc2019, multiple researchers (such as @mtrc) argued that we should aim for reflective creative systems as well — it’s not just something for humans.

MR discusses the big questions of AI-assisted writing. What is the role of the AI vs the role of the human? What is high quality output? How do we combine the strong points of the AI (surprise, randomness) with those of the human (common sense, reflection)? #storynlp

MR mentions the computational creativity community and the gap between the CC and NLP communities. Luckily we are currently closing that gap. #storynlp

Melissa Roemmele is presenting about systems for assisting humans with writing stories and helping people to overcome writer’s block. #storynlp

Frank Ferraro opens the workshop. #storynlp features research with both neural and linguistic approaches to generating and analyzing stories.

The second workshop on Storytelling in NLP is about to start at #acl2019! #storynlp

Presention by Weiyan Shi. More info in image, paper here: aclweb.org/anthology/pape…

Interesting data collection task for studying persuasive language: crowdworkers were asked to persuade other crowdworkers to donate part of their task money to Save The Children. Researchers collected personality info, dialogues and outcomes. #ACL2019

I'll come say hi!

I complained via support. They emailed back that this was public information they pulled by request of the conference organisation. However, my Linkedin Profile is not public.

The conference app @WhovaSupport for #acl2019 automatically populated the app with data from my private LinkedIn profile, without asking any permission from me. Surely this can't be in line with European privacy law? :/

Open access paper here: aclweb.org/anthology/pape…

We can build classifiers to distinguish illegal and legal (textual) content on the darknet, and also distinguish these types of darknet content from regular marketplaces such as Ebay, even if we only use part-of-speech tags and not the words themselves.

Daniel Hershcovich is giving a talk about language usage on the dark net, in the apllications session at #acl2019. It’s always nice to see NLP combined with infosec and security themes.

@dongng Hey Dong! Heb je zin om samen te lunchen op #ACL2019?

I will try and live-tweet some of the talks. :)

@roman_klinger So far you're the only person who mentioned (attending) #storyNLP on Twitter, so want to hang out for lunch at #ACL2019?

Link to the paper: aclweb.org/anthology/pape…

The proceedings of the second #storyNLP workshop at #ACL2019 are online! You can find my latest paper in there too: a survey of narrative coherence methods from #nanogenmo 2018 participants. aclweb.org/anthology/volu…

I'm attending the #acl2019 main conf and the #StoryNLP workshop in Florence (IT) this week. Come say hi if you want to talk about language generation and video games. :) #acl2019nlp

TIL "Twitter dark matter" sunelehmann.com/2013/12/04/you…

Python3 of course! Cheap Bots Done Quick can also work, although then you're limited in the social behavior you can program. I've never heard of ChatScript.

I'm co-organizing a course about Twitter-bots and oh boy did I dig my own (productivity) grave there. Guess who suggested the topic.

Me: "And what's the word for someone who lives in Den Haag?"
Non-Dutch colleague: "Haag... Haag... Hagelslag?"

If you play, write, develop or research games, especially interactive narrative, adventure games, or interactive fiction, check out the talks from @narrascope 2019: youtube.com/playlist?list=…

"I’ve sat through too many talks that evidently came from the mantra, 'I have something I am obligated to tell you,' or worse, 'I have something I am obligated to say while in your vicinity.'" sciencemag.org/careers/2019/0…

Er is geen verschil tussen de onderwerpen links en rechts. De projecten zijn chronologisch weergegeven, maar er is verder geen structuur of hiërarchie in de layout van de onderwerpen.

Je kan kiezen voor verzending naar Zweden, en morgen kan je zien of de code ook werkt voor verzenden naar Zweden (dat weet ik niet zeker). :)

Ik heb 'm gekopieerd uit mijn seller-dashboard op Spreadshirt. Note dat 'ie pas geldig zou moeten zijn vanaf 13/7 (morgen).

De Spreadshirt actiecode is "SHIP4YOU".

Van 13 t/m 17 juli betaal je geen verzendkosten in mijn webshop met t-shirts! meteorietdesign.nl/shop

Rectification: multiple people have pointed out to me that the graph should read:
2020: ????
2021: profit

Research is rarely linear. Here is a graph of my PhD research projects so far, together with their most important research topics. #phdlife

Research is rarely linear. Here is a graph of my PhD research projects so far, together with their most important research topics. #phdlife

The Dream Merchant (De Gevleugelde Kat) by Isabella Hoving. It's about teenagers time-travelling through dreams.

A Dutch group of disinformation experts (@wijzijnDROG) has made this awesome game to create more awareness about fake news and online polarisation.
NL: slechtnieuws.nl
EN: getbadnews.com

A pentester walks into a bar and orders 1 beer, MAX_INT+1 beers, -1 beer, an otter, 15, "/etc/passwd/", elevated privileges and a root shell.

What about 'server' and 'client'?

My blogpost about the Computational Creativity conference @iccc_conf is finally done: judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/visi… featuring work by @pgervas @thomas_wint @ChristophSalge @nickmofo @mtrc and many others. Enjoy and see you next year. :) #ICCC19

I was planning on writing a short, one-page summary of #ICCC19. Four pages of fountain pen scribblings later and I'm at day 2 of the conference. 😂

Blog post follows.

If you're having a bad day, just wave to HiBot: vimeo.com/184236936

Last night I couldn't sleep, so I took a dive in the archives of Edsger W. Dijkstra -- one of my favorite computer scientists. Here is an historical overview of 28 years of EWDs, written to celebrate the 1000th manuscript in the series. cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/tran… #ewd #compsci

Most of the games we discussed are already mentioned, but my personal current obsession is Cultist Simulator, of which I played the demo during #LudoNarraCon. I don’t think it contains generation but it does have a lot of interesting narrative.

For completeness: this paper won the Best Paper Award at @iccc_conf 2019!

The venue for ICCC21 is going to be in Mexico City, Mexico! #iccc19

The best paper of #iccc19 is @MatthewGuz and @mark_riedl’s paper “Combinets: Creativity via Recombination of Neural Networks”. Congratulations!

There is now an online, free to publish, open access Journal for Computational Creativity. It is open for submissions in latex/pdf. Single blind peer review. jcc.computationalcreativity.net #iccc19

JokeJudger is a platform for generating, writing and evaluating “I like my X like I like my Y: Z” jokes. Available on github: github.com/TWinters/jokej… #iccc19

And the prize for funniest slide deck goes to... #iccc19

The last talk of #iccc19 is by @thomas_wint, who talks about generating jokes from rated examples.

You can tell we are in the computational humor track! Speaker Mika Hämäläinen broke some people in the audience with movie title pun “The Beauty and the Beets”. #iccc19

Methods for spicing up headlines: adding well-known phrases (wikiquote), and adding figurative language (metaphors, similes) with the right polarity. The slide in the photo contains example outputs. #iccc19

Next up, a talk by Khalid Alnajjar of the University of Helsinki about headline generation with colourful language. #iccc19

Q: How can CC help mathematics research? A: Help to develop systems that can do human-like mathematics, as this problem fits the strengths of CC research: human factors in computing, evaluating creativity, working with experts, finding metaphors and analogies, etc. #iccc19

Pease juxtaposes “frontstage mathematics” (polished papers with formal proofs) and “backstage mathematics” (informal collaborations, discussions) in the search for human-like mathematics. #iccc19

I very much agree with this quote of J. Dibbets: what we do as artists and scientists is basically the same thing. #iccc19

Alison Pease talks about the place of computational creativity in math, AI and other sciences, and vice versa. #iccc19

Artistic indicators (painting, musical notes) vs scientific indicators (data, formulas) in drawings: computational creativity researchers are associated with both. #iccc19

“Draw CC researchers”: “waka waka, make the art thing!”

“What do Computational creativity researchers do all day?” and some adjectives to describe CS vs CC researchers. #iccc19

Talk about stereotypes in computational creativity by @TheNeuroGirl. Computer science students were asked to describe their image of CC research(ers). #iccc19

Take away messages: collect feedback about CC systems in all stages of research, not just during evaluation, and there are many ways to obtain this feedback. #iccc2019

Important talk by @ackermanmaya about the why and how of “field work” in computational creativity, illustrated with examples from music system Alysia and story generator Mexica. #iccc2019

And at least three seasons of Downton Abbey. ;) #ICCC2019

Two beautiful and accessible introduction slides in @pgervas’ talk about the INES story generation system. The first slide illustrates the general concept of automatic story generation, the second slide lists six famous story gen systems. #iccc19

Quiz yourself: generated poetry or Dadaist poetry?

Ah! I hadn’t noticed the theme of this session, which is “theory”.

This is the research “Engagement-Reflection in Software Construction” by Quinten Rosseel and Geraint A. Wiggins. :)

Late breaking work on story generation and Hoare logic. To be honest: the line “Hoare triples provided by user” cracked me up. I guess this system has a radically different target audience than other systems we’ve seen at #iccc19

Interesting to hear about applications of machine learning for art from practising artists. Dancer, physicist and choreographer Marriel Pettee lists ideas for choreography on this slide. #ICCC2019

#iccc2019 visitors can hide from the extreme weather at the Creative Machine Learning session. ;)

Slides like this get me-the-designer immediately excited for the talk

My compliments for the intuitive explanation!

.@MatthewGuz explaining a new approach for building classifiers for domains with little data. Instead of training a separate classifier, build a classifier by recombining existing deep neural network classifiers. Two experiments: image classification and image generation #iccc19

.@ChristophSalge is telling us about the new @GenDesignMC bonus challenge about... drumroll... narrative generation! Goal is to produce texts (minecraft books) that chronicle the history of the generated settlements. #ICCC2019

I had the feeling they were joking. Am I mistaken? 🙈

Alison Pease on framing after @mtrc’s talk: “Papers frame systems, talks frame papers. We all use framing in our research.” #iccc2019

Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault gave a keynote about conceptual artworks made from/with technology. Two works that I really liked: Beuys Voice by Name June Paik and Stochastic Process Painting 14 by Cheyney Thompson. #ICCC2019

Thanks #ICCC2019! I presented at the poster session, and afterwards I understood my own work even better than before -- especially its place within the computational creativity field.

I'm currently in the US for ICCC19, and I will be in London (COG) and Florence (ACL) in August. I think that's it for 2019 in terms of confs. Are you coming to Europe anytime soon or should we actively try to find an overlapping conference next year? ;)

And of course I forgot Anne Shirley. ;)

I already contain parts Hermione and Jo March... but hope to turn out like Granny Weatherwax in the long run.

John Gero talking about novelty as component of computational creativity. “Thinking of something that is just novel is trivial, anyone can do it.” And then I thought of my favorite Fry and Laurie sketch: youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQ… #iccc19

Paper: West and Horvitz, AAAI 2019, reverse engineering satire

Nice anecdote: researchers in computational humor turned a common data gathering exercise around: they asked humans to change one word in headlines from The Onion, to change the content from satirical into something serious, which is much easier. Brilliant! #ICCC2019

2011 live version of the song: m.youtube.com/watch?v=QsQ31e…

Razvan Bunescu is talking about surprise in computational creativity. Was anyone else thinking about Tim Minchin’s F-Sharp song when seeing this slide? #iccc2019

An interesting side effect of this behaviour is that we can observe two of Veale’s bots have a Twitter “discussion”, i.e. exchanging automated insults, advice and personality analysis twitter.com/readmelikeabot…

Although the work is interesting, I don’t agree with the bot’s social behaviour, which doesn’t follow best practices for automated social interactions. At all. See also twitter.com/matthewguz/sta…

Tony Veale explained his bot-with-a-personality @ReadMeLikeABot. The bot recommends books to (sometimes unsuspecting) users of a particular hashtag, and its tweets are also meant to provoke discussions. #ICCC2019

@narmio I see a strong correlation between researchers from Sydney and the number of jokes they make during public speaking. Coincidence or is it the Australian education system?

The proceedings from #ICCC19 are up! Lots of great research on computational creativity, all open access. Find them here (including the Churnalist paper): computationalcreativity.net/iccc2019/asset…

Kyle Booten talks about improving linguistic diversity as inspired by Erasmus’ De Copia. Asking writers to change one cliche/common word already has noticable effect. #ICCC2019

I learned this the hard way when dining out with a group of 20 at CCC. ;)

Lots of these tips also work for academic conferences!

"When a scientist in the 21st century needs to be an excellent writer, (...) an excellent mentor, an engaging speaker, a talented graphic designer, a modern website designer, a producer of pithy soundbites, a social media guru… something’s gotta give."

fromthelabbench.com/from-the-lab-b…

Thanks for the reply and clarification.

I submitted a demo paper about Churnalist to the IEEE Conference on Games (COG) 2019, which was accepted. I’ll be demonstrating my headline generator in London (UK) at the industry day (free entrance!) on August 20. Be sure to come and say hi of you’re in the neighbourhood!

What made @cog2019ieee decide that "each paper must be accompanied by at least one full (not student) registration"? I'm a PhD student presenting a demo paper, so attending and presenting costs me £200 extra in registration fees?

Thank you! :)

My paper on #nanogenmo, which discusses approaches for generating coherent long stories (50000+ words), has been accepted at the @ACL2019_Italy StoryNLP workshop!

from nltk.corpus import stopwords #NLProc

"Don't make World of Warcraft, make the "click-to-fish" fishing minigame of World of Warcraft." Solid advice from @GalaxyKate. galaxykate.com/blog/devsteps.…

Pipiandum volet, commentarii interretiales manent.

Essay about recent improvements in creative AI and how they might influence society.
lesswrong.com/posts/q4vQLfqn…

This May, OpenAI released a new, medium-sized model for GPT-2, which can be used for generating coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time. You can try out the new model here: talktotransformer.com

Dear #academictwitter, there are 4 days left in this poll, and I'm still curious about your answers.

Dear #academia, who builds and maintains the website for your (consortium) research project? #askacademia #phdchat #academictwitter @AcademicChatter

Epitaph by @maxkreminski! mkremins.itch.io/epitaph

Dear #academia, who builds and maintains the website for your (consortium) research project? #askacademia #phdchat #academictwitter @AcademicChatter

OH: "If you're a game maker, your salary depends on the amount of dopamine you can create in the people that play your games."

That would be a good choice for LinkedIn to increase their revenue -- recruiters pay them to interact with members, right?

It almost looks like random generation: Java is my lowest ranked programming language (only 1 endorsement). SANS EMEA is the most recent educational institute, which is a logical choice -- although my 3 years at Radboud University are more important than a 1 week course at SANS.

Depending on your demographic info (e.g. student, professional, etc.) , LinkedIn picks a specific template. Template-based summarization can work -- but I'm wondering how the generator chooses which information to include.

LinkedIn wrote a this post in which they explain the process for generating these summaries. They searched for human-made, well-written summaries in their customer data, and created templates based on those. linkedin.com/pulse/solving-… 3/

My summary contains keywords like "Java" (not my favourite or most-used language), "LaTeX" (not exactly a crucial skill in my career), "English" (hardly worth mentioning in a summary) and "SANS EMEA" (great school, but not the most relevant institute in my education) 2/

LinkedIn is now automatically generating profile summaries. Unfortunately, computers are not very good (yet) in guessing which information is the most important. 1/

On my way to @DGA_online’s Dutch Game Summit to meet devs and researchers. Come talk to me if you are interested in text generation for games, or just want to say hi! #dutchgamesummit

@butterfieldcoco Is it possible to buy your music from before Puppets (Warrior, Astronaut, Mother, Five bells, etc.) somewhere? Preferably digital music and the money should go to the artists :)

These emoticons translate to "Face screaming in fear". I will interpret this tweet as "BEWARE INTERNET THIS MAD SCIENTIST IS DEVELOPING MORE DANGEROUS TEXT GENERATORS AND SUBMITTING THEM TO NLP CONFERENCES RUNNNNN".

Yes I am! :)

There is a workshop on storytelling at @ACL2019_Italy in Florence. More info and CFP here: visionandlanguage.net/workshop2019/ . The deadline for papers is 26/4. Paper topics include story generation and AI! :) #storyNLP #NLG #ACL2019

Read this conversation if you program (chat)bots. It's important. #evilNLG

The poem Jabberwocky is full of "nonce words", i.e. words "created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_word en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwoc…

En wat is een leesmeter?!

Is "1 leeskm" dan 1000 boeken, 1000 bladzijden, 1000 zinnen, paragrafen, hoofdstukken, woorden?

It is as important to know how NOT to use a technology, as it is to know how to use it. Blockchain and NLG are both good examples. #evilNLG

TIL the existence of @CheckPointOrg, a charity organisation that provides mental health resources for gamers and the gaming community. Check out their list of video games for well-being: checkpoint.org.au/games-for-heal…

"Hapax legomenon" (linguistics): a word that occurs only once within a context, either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_leg…

(DATA Agent is) a game in which all characters, places, and items are generated using open data, making every play session, every murder mystery, unique. um.edu.mt/think/the-unus… #procgen

This is the reason that I LOVE #NaNoGenMo. Participants must share their source code and generated text to win the challenge. #NLG

I replied to my tweet with a link to the github repo of whatthecommit, but unfortunately, the text data (commit messages) are not included in the repo.

Serious answer: there are some people working on code analysis and generating commit messages for that. Example: ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/docum…

Not so serious answer: youtube.com/watch?v=AWVhw3…

Story generation with logic programming. This is an example written in Samovar, a DSL for world-building. It's similar to Hoare logic, i.e. to define the narrative you write a set of pre- and post-conditions.
Excerpt of the code from github.com/catseye/NaNoGe… #NLG #nanogenmo

Source here: github.com/ngerakines/com…
Whatthecommit was made by @ngerakines :)

How to use natural language generation for evil: include a generated information-less commit message in every git commit. Examples: whatthecommit.com #evilNLG

Profound wisdom in Lecture Notes on Interactive Storytelling: "more interactivity does not necessarily mean more agency", i.e. having lots of options to choose from does not imply that we have more influence on the world.

Thanks for sharing this, this is important. :)

What about suggesting new people for inclusion on the list to its creators?

There is an interesting discussion going on atm on social media about whether authors of new ML papers should provide the code with which they obtained the results. Trigger was the updated submission policy of @NeurIPSConf. See reddit.com/r/MachineLearn… and twitter.com/egrefen/status…

From Great Expectations 2.0:
"Hold your noise!!!!!!!!!!!!!" cried a HORRIFIC voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch! "Keep still, you
SMALL devil, or I'll cut your throat!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Reading a Great Work of Literature, but is it too boring for you to finish it? There is a solution: substitute all adjectives with their MOST EXTREME synonym or add an intensifier. Then add MORE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!! The result will surprise you! github.com/NaNoGenMo/2018…

Awesome! I bought vol 2, as I'm interested in your tips about writing & art business. Looking forward to reading it! :)

It’s #GumroadDay! Don’t forget to support your favorite artists by buying their digital products! I will be buying the beautiful art of @heikala_art and @strangelykatie.

I'm starting a newsletter in Dutch about design, specifically for researchers and people working with data. :)

What about the comic book series Lumberjanes? Although they are not as rule-abiding as Hermione... boom-studios.com/series/lumberj…

My favorite variations on this are "What did you say?", "That's none of your business" and "My network provider cut me off for downloading too many cat pictures."

Check out this sci-fi short story generator written for #NaNoGenMo 2018: github.com/spenteco/nanog… The maker published the code as a Jupyter notebook, with headings for all steps in the book generation process. This makes it very readable for text-generation beginners. Enjoy!

The researchers accidentally swapped the generator's metaphor and computational humor modules. #NLG

The @Official_GDC youtube channel has a treasure trove of talks about narrative in video games. youtube.com/playlist?list=…

Ik heb dit probleem ook vaak. Laatst las ik een schattig boekje over timemanagement waar ook 'de kunst van het stoppen' in werd besproken. Dat advies probeer ik nu af en toe te gebruiken. ;)

...but I research applied text-generation and AI for games. I spend most of my spare time creating text and graphics, and I'm slowly teaching myself games development too.

Interesting perspective. I only play games occasionally, and sometimes I feel I lack the "gamer experience" that is necessary for those working in the games domain. I don't work in industry but 1/2

C'est l'hiver qui s'efface, la fin d'une saison
C'est la neige qui fond, ce sont les eaux de Mars
La promesse de vie, le mystère profond
Ce sont les eaux de Mars dans ton coeur tout au fond
youtu.be/VrvjsjNEocU

You can get the girl out of infosec, but you can’t get the infosec out of the girl. Tonight at 20:00 I’ll listen to the live broastcast of @ngrynerds, a Dutch podcast about security, privacy and ~cyber~. As a bonus, they have an irc channel for audience interaction.

Can we please stop the unnecessary use of passive voice in Academese? Write "We used tool X for [goal]" instead of "Various affordances of tool X are appropriated to [goal]". Readability of research is important, esp. if we want society to understand and use our findings.

Oe, cool, ik zal eens luisteren. Misschien tot morgen. ;)

If you have an ancient Wacom Graphire 4 pen tablet (like me), and the official drivers don't work on newer versions of Windows... this blogpost might have a solution: cadnauseam.com/2018/03/21/how…

Oh wat leuk! Gefeliciteerd! Dan snap ik de radiostilte (ha) heel goed, ja.

@marcel_vd_velde @marjolijstje Wat is er met GoedFolk gebeurd? De laatste podcast op de site is van juli 2018. Zijn jullie gestopt? Ik kon nergens een nieuwsberichtje vinden, vandaar deze vraag.

Well well well @aaronareed has marketing-bot called @B0tAaron. Naturally, I need one of those. Might as well use my text generation research for something related to my graphic design company! :')

Reminds me of @doctorow's graphic novel In Real Life.

@xfoml How's your research on the history of text-generation games (if I recall correctly) coming along? :) I'd be interested in a write-up of your findings so far.

"222 research papers on the stack, 222 research papers. You read one abstract and pass it around, 232 research papers on the stack." #phdlife #academia

Sinds kort in mijn webshop: een security-themed t-shirt dat ook verkrijgbaar is als fatsoenlijk vrouwen-shirt. Natuurlijk kan je dit ontwerp ook krijgen als heren-shirt. En voor de mensen die niet van zwart houden: je kan ook zelf een kleur t-shirt kiezen. Enjoy! #infosec

As someone working on (chat) bots and automatic text creation, I'm curious to hear about society's views, wants and wishes on this topic. Any thoughts on what directions text generation researchers should abandon or investigate?

And the prize for 'most punny abstract of a scientific publication' goes to E. Patterson and J. Baron for their contribution titled 'Real-time rocks: Shader-based labradorite'. #puns #humor #phdlife

In 2014, 'mathematical foundations' was a limited edition shirt design that I hand-screenprinted in my art studio in Nijmegen. Starting today, you can buy this design in my new webshop AND you can pick from over ten different shirt colours. :D
shop.spreadshirt.nl/meteoriet-desi…

Blog posts:
- judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2013/how-…
- judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2015/adob…
- judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2014/shor…
- judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2013/8-ti…

I’ve re-uploaded some of my earlier blogposts about graphic design to judithvanstegeren.com/blog/! Now you can read about chainmail, Adobe Illustrator, the history of typography and my tips for self-employed designers, among other topics.

I'm reading 'Purple cow' right now! It's a great read, and it's interesting to see how much of his advice from 2003 is still relevant.

This is true, although sometimes I worry about using someone else's infrastructure instead of my own webserver. Uploaded social media content can be hard to download, backup, search through, remove, etc.

By the way, if you want to read more about this, I REALLY liked @b0rk's blogpost about marketing that feels good and authentic jvns.ca/blog/2019/01/2…

Currently my biggest conundrum as a creative person with a business: what is the best way for a business to keep in contact with interested people (and hopefully potential clients)? I'm allergic to most marketing, but if I just ignore it, no one knows Meteoriet Design exists.

Currently my biggest conundrum as a creative person with a business: what is the best way for a business to keep in contact with interested people (and hopefully potential clients)? I'm allergic to most marketing, but if I just ignore it, no one knows Meteoriet Design exists.

I'm so happy! Today I finally opened my own tshirt webshop. My designs were already available via RedBubble, but now my Dutch friends can buy it directly from my own webshop at shop.spreadshirt.nl/meteoriet-desi… :)

Just blogged: Video game corpora, in which I share some fun data sources for NLG for games that I found. :) Featuring work by @drtowerstein, @Orteil42 and @maxkreminski. Read it here: judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/vide…

@GabbBarros Is your dissertation publicly available? Would love to read it. :)

"...and the latest installment in the Anne of Green Gables series, titled Anne of Monaco."

And there's another delay in the start of Code Jam to I/O for Women: the countdown timer is now at '24 minutes'.

Today's Code Jam to I/O for Women contest (Google) starts 30 minutes later. The website currently has a countdown timer with 18 mins remaining.

Me neither. I think the round is not online yet.

Ja. Het komt ook voor dat domeinnamen van (oude) conferenties door iemand worden opgekocht, om het verkeer naar die domeinen om te leiden naar dit soort websites.

Another term that would make a great name for a metal band.

Hear, hear! We should "normalize and destigmatize seeking mental health care" in academia.
dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/why… #phdlife

MORE old Lady Grantham GIFs :D

If I submit something and they accept it, yes. ;)

I would love to attend this workshop, but I can't use my bench fee for traveling to workshops outside Europe. What are good ways to find & apply for a travel grant? #phdlife #askacademia
twitter.com/FDGconf/status…

"Don't make me read deep into the paper to understand what the hell you're doing and what the results were. It's not a Dan Brown novel -- there's no big surprise at the end." matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-i-…

New blogpost! If your input dataset is biased in any way, that same bias will end up in the results of the generator trained on that same dataset. #nlg
judithvanstegeren.com/blog/2019/choo…

By the way, this Twitter meme is PERFECT for a bot. You could build a "Hi, I'm a (...)" generator based on a collection of movie quotes, game dialogue, or the script of a tv-series.

Hi, I'm a computer scientist working in natural language generation. You may know me from my greatest hits "Can't we automate this?", "OF COURSE I'm writing another Twitter bot", "Looking for a better corpus" and "No, I did NOT generate this thesis chapter (but I wish I had)".

Hi, I'm a computer scientist working in natural language generation. You may know me from my greatest hits "Can't we automate this?", "OF COURSE I'm writing another Twitter bot", "Looking for a better corpus" and "No, I did NOT generate this thesis chapter (but I wish I had)".

Technical debt: that moment when you realise why you wanted to order a larger SSD three months ago. #phdlife

Fooling around with low-poly renders in Blender on my day off.

I love how Chapter 2 of this book for PhD students has a section about self-care! Way to go, @evalantsoght! #phdlife

I don't think so, as CLIN is a relatively small conference. But you can ask the organisers. ;)

I'll be speaking about my new project Churnalist, a headline generator for game contexts, at @29_clin as part of the track "Creating text is fun!" (great track name). Looking forward to seeing the Dutch computational linguistics community again at January 31st. :)