Publications

@inproceedings{gordon_story_2008,

title = {Story Management Technologies for Organizational Learning},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Story%20Management%20Technologies%20for%20Organizational%20Learning.pdf},

year  = {2008},

date = {2008-09-01},

booktitle = {International Conference on Knowledge Management, Special Track on Intelligent Assistance for Self-Directed and Organizational Learning},

address = {Graz, Austria},

abstract = {The stories told among members of an organization are an effective instrument for knowledge socialization, the sharing of experiences through social mechanisms. However, the utility of stories for organizational learning is limited due to the difficulties in acquiring stories that are relevant to the practices of an organization, identifying the learning goals that these stories serve, and delivering these stories to the right people and the right time in a manner that best facilitates learning. In this paper we outline a vision for story-based organizational learning in the future, and describe three areas where intelligent technologies can be applied to automate story management practices in support of organizational learning. First, we describe automated story capture technologies that identify narratives of people's experiences within the context of a larger discourse. Second, we describe automated retrieval technologies that identify stories that are relevant to specific educational needs. Third, we describe how stories can be transformed into effective story-based learning environments with minimal development costs.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{manshadi_learning_2008,

title = {Learning a Probabilistic Model of Event Sequences From Internet Weblog Stories},

author = {Mehdi Manshadi and Reid Swanson and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Learning%20a%20Probabilistic%20Model%20of%20Event%20Sequences%20From%20Internet%20Weblog%20Stories.pdf},

year  = {2008},

date = {2008-05-01},

booktitle = {21st Conference of the Florida AI Society, Applied Natural Language Processing Track},

address = {Coconut Grove, FL},

abstract = {One of the central problems in building broad-coverage story understanding systems is generating expectations about event sequences, i.e. predicting what happens next given some arbitrary narrative context. In this paper, we describe how a large corpus of stories extracted from Internet weblogs was used to learn a probabilistic model of event sequences using statistical language modeling techniques. Our approach was to encode weblog stories as sequences of events, one per sentence in the story, where each event was represented as a pair of descriptive key words extracted from the sentence. We then applied statistical language modeling techniques to each of the event sequences in the corpus. We evaluated the utility of the resulting model for the tasks of narrative event ordering and event prediction.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hobbs_deep_2008,

title = {The Deep Lexical Semantics of Emotions},

author = {Jerry R. Hobbs and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/The%20Deep%20Lexical%20Semantics%20of%20Emotions.pdf},

year  = {2008},

date = {2008-05-01},

booktitle = {International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) Workshop on Sentiment Analysis: Emotion, Metaphor, Ontology and Terminology (EMOT)},

address = {Marrakech, Morocco},

abstract = {We understand discourse so well because we know so much. If we are to have natural language understanding systems that are able to deal with texts with emotional content, we must encode knowledge of human emotions for use in the systems. In particular, we must equip the system with a formal version of people's implicit theory of how emotions mediate between what they experience and what they do, and rules that link the theory with words and phrases in the emotional lexicon. The effort we describe here is part of a larger project in knowledge-based natural language understanding to construct a collection of abstract and concrete core formal theories of fundamental phenomena, geared to language, and to define or at least characterize the most common words in English in terms of these theories (Hobbs, 2008). One collection of theories we have put a considerable amount of work into is a commonsense theory of human cognition, or how people think they think (Hobbs and Gordon, 2005). A formal theory of emotions is an important piece of this. In this paper we describe this theory and our efforts to define a number of the most common words about emotions in terms of this and other theories. Vocabulary related to emotions has been studied extensively within the field of linguistics, with particular attention to cross-cultural differences (Athanasiadou and Tabakowska, 1998; Harkins and Wierzbicka, 2001; Wierzbicka, 1999). Within computational linguistics, there has been recent interest in creating large-scale text corpora where expressions of emotion and other private states are annotated (Wiebe et al., 2005). In Section 2 we describe Core WordNet and our categorization of it to determine the most frequent words about cognition and emotion. In Section 3 we describe an effort to flesh out the emotional lexicon by searching a large corpus for emotional terms, so we can have some assurance of high coverage in both the core theory and the lexical items linked to it. In Section 4 we sketch the principal facets of some of the core theories. In Section 5 we describe the theory of Emotion with several examples of words characterized in terms of the theories.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{swanson_supporting_2008,

title = {Supporting Musical Creativity With Unsupervised Syntactic Parsing},

author = {Reid Swanson and Elaine Chew and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Supporting%20Musical%20Creativity%20With%20Unsupervised%20Syntactic%20Parsing.pdf},

year  = {2008},

date = {2008-03-01},

booktitle = {AAAI Spring Symposium Series},

address = {Stanford University},

abstract = {Music and language are two human activities that fit well with a traditional notion of creativity and are particularly suited to computational exploration. In this paper we will argue for the necessity of syntactic processing in musical applications. Unsupervised methods offer uniquely interesting approaches to supporting creativity. We will demonstrate using the Constituent Context Model that syntactic structure of musical melodies can be learned automatically without annotated training data. Using a corpus built from the Well Tempered Clavier by Bach we describe a simple classification experiment that shows the relative quality of the induced parse trees for musical melodies.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_storyupgrade_2008,

title = {StoryUpgrade: Finding Stories in Internet Weblogs},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Reid Swanson},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/StoryUpgrade-%20Finding%20Stories%20in%20Internet%20Weblogs.pdf},

year  = {2008},

date = {2008-03-01},

booktitle = {International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media},

abstract = {The phenomenal rise of Internet weblogging has created new opportunities for people to tell personal stories of their life experience, and the potential to share these stories with those who can most benefit from reading them. One barrier to this new mode of storytelling is the lack of accessibility; existing Internet search tools are not tailored to the unique characteristics of this textual genre. In this paper we describe our efforts to develop a search engine specifically for the stories that appear in Internet weblogs, called StoryUpgrade. This application utilizes statistical text classification technologies to separate story content from other text in weblog entries, and facilitates searches for stories that are related to particular activities of interest.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_common_2008,

title = {Common Sense Knowledge and Goal-Oriented Interfaces},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Catherine Havasi and Mathias Lux and Markus Strohmaier},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Common%20Sense%20Knowledge%20and%20Goal-Oriented%20Interfaces.pdf},

year  = {2008},

date = {2008-01-01},

booktitle = {2008 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces},

address = {Canary Islands, Spain},

abstract = {We present an overview of the workshop on Common Sense Knowledge and Goal-Oriented Interfaces held at the 2008 Intelligent User Interfaces conference. Six papers were accepted from diverse research groups, each offering innovative new research on interfaces that incorporate common sense knowledge and that are oriented around the goals of their users.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_automated_2007,

title = {Automated Story Capture From Internet Weblogs},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Yong Cao and Reid Swanson},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Automated%20Story%20Capture%20From%20Internet%20Weblogs.pdf},

year  = {2007},

date = {2007-10-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Knowledge Capture},

address = {Whistler, BC},

abstract = {mong the most interesting ways that people share knowledge is through the telling of stories, i.e. first-person narratives about real life experiences. Millions of these stories appear in Internet weblogs, offering a potentially valuable resource for future knowledge management and training applications. In this paper we describe efforts to automatically capture stories from Internet weblogs by extracting them using statistical text classification techniques. We evaluate the precision and recall performance of competing approaches. We describe the large-scale application of story extraction technology to Internet weblogs, producing a corpus of stories with over a billion words.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_generalizing_2007,

title = {Generalizing Semantic Role Annotations Across Syntactically Similar Verbs},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Reid Swanson},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Generalizing%20Semantic%20Role%20Annotations%20Across%20Syntactically%20Similar%20Verbs.pdf},

year  = {2007},

date = {2007-06-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2007 Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-07)},

address = {Prague, Czech Republic},

abstract = {Large corpora of parsed sentences with semantic role labels (e.g. PropBank) provide training data for use in the creation of high-performance automatic semantic role labeling systems. Despite the size of these corpora, individual verbs (or role-sets) often have only a handful of instances in these corpora, and only a fraction of English verbs have even a single annotation. In this paper, we describe an approach for dealing with this sparse data problem, enabling accurate semantic role labeling for novel verbs (rolesets) with only a single training example. Our approach involves the identification of syntactically similar verbs found in PropBank, the alignment of arguments in their corresponding rolesets, and the use of their corresponding annotations in PropBank as surrogate training data.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hill_axlnet_2006,

title = {AXL.Net: Web-enabled Case Method Instruction for Accelerating Tacit Knowledge Acquisition in Leaders},

author = {Randall W. Hill and Julia Kim and MIchelle L. Zbylut and Andrew S. Gordon and David Traum and Sudeep Gandhe and Stewart King and Salvo Lavis and Scott Rocher},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/AXLNet-%20Web-enabled%20Case%20Method%20Instruction%20for%20Accelerating%20Tacit%20Knowledge%20Acquisition%20in%20Leaders.PDF},

year  = {2006},

date = {2006-11-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th Army Science Conference},

address = {Orlando, FL},

abstract = {AXL.Net is a prototype web-based immersive technology solution that supports case method teaching for U.S. Army leader development. The AXL.Net system addresses three challenges: (1) designing a pedagogicallysound research prototype for leader development, (2) integrating research technologies with the best of Web 2.0 innovations to enhance case method teaching, and (3) providing an easy to use system. Initial evaluations show that the prototype application and framework is effective for leader development.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group, Virtual Humans},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_integrating_2006,

title = {Integrating logical inference into statistical text classification applications},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Reid Swanson},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Integrating%20Logical%20Inference%20Into%20Statistical%20Text%20Classification%20Applications.pdf},

year  = {2006},

date = {2006-10-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of AAAI Fall Symposium on Integrating Logical Reasoning into Everyday Applications},

address = {Washington D.C.},

abstract = {Contemporary statistical text classification is becoming increasingly common across a wide range of everyday applications. Typically, the bottlenecks in performance are the availability and consistency of large amounts of training data. We argue that these techniques could be improved by seamlessly integrating logical inference into the text encoding pipeline, making it possible to utilize large-scale commonsense and special-purpose knowledge bases to aid in the interpretation and encoding of documents.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_fourth_2006,

title = {Fourth Frame Forums: Interactive Comics for Collaborative Learning},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Fourth%20Frame%20Forums-%20Interactive%20Comics%20for%20Collaborative%20Learning.pdf},

year  = {2006},

date = {2006-10-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM 2006)},

address = {Santa Barbara, CA},

abstract = {In this paper, we describe Fourth Frame Forums, an application that combines traditional four-frame comic strips with online web-based discussion forums. In this application, users are presented with a four-frame comic strip where the last dialogue balloon of the fourth frame is left blank. By typing a statement into this dialogue balloon, the user creates a new discussion thread in the forum, where the user?s dialogue choice can be critiqued and discussed by other users of the forum. We argue that Fourth Frame Forums provide an elegant and cost-effective solution for online education and training environments for communities of learners. We provide examples from the domain of US Army leadership development, and compare Fourth Frame Forums to alternative methods of story-directed simulation and training.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{swanson_comparison_2006,

title = {A Comparison of Alternative Parse Tree Paths for Labeling Semantic Roles},

author = {Reid Swanson and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/A%20Comparison%20of%20Alternative%20Parse%20Tree%20Paths%20for%20Labeling%20Semantic%20Roles.pdf},

year  = {2006},

date = {2006-07-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING/ACL)},

address = {Sydney, Australia},

abstract = {The integration of sophisticated inference-based techniques into natural language processing applications first requires a reliable methos of encoding the predicate-argument structure of the propositional context of text. Recent statistical approaches to automated predicate-argument annotaion have utilized parse tree paths as predictive features, which encode the path between a verb predicate and a node in the parse tree that governs its argument. In this paper, we explore a number of alternaitves for how these parse tree paths are encoded, focusing on the difference between automatically generated constituency parses and dependency parses. After describing five alternatives for encoding parse tree paths, we investigate how well each can be aligned with the argument substrings in annotated text corpora, their relative precision and recall performance, and their comparative learning curves. Results indicate that constituency parsers produce parse tree paths that can more easily be aligned to argument substrings, perform better in precision and recall, and have more favorable learning curves than those produced by a dependency parser.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gandhe_improving_2006,

title = {Improving Question-Answering With Linking Dialogues},

author = {Sudeep Gandhe and Andrew S. Gordon and David Traum},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Improving%20Question-Answering%20With%20Linking%20Dialogues%20.pdf},

year  = {2006},

date = {2006-01-01},

booktitle = {International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-2006)},

address = {Sydney, Australia},

abstract = {Question-answering dialogue systems have found many applications in interactive learning environments. This paper is concerned with one such application for Army leadership training, where trainees input free-text questions that elicit pre-recorded video responses. Since these responses are already crafted before the question is asked, a certain degree of incoherence exists between the question that is asked and the answer that is given. This paper explores the use of short linking dialogues that stand in between the question and its video response to alleviate the problem of incoherence. We describe a set of experiments with human generated linking dialogues that demonstrate their added value. We then describe our implementation of an automated method for utilizing linking dialogues and show that these have better coherence properties than the original system without linking dialogues.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group, Virtual Humans},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_automated_2005,

title = {Automated Story Capture From Conversational Speech},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Kavita Ganesan},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Automated%20Story%20Capture%20From%20Conversational%20Speech.pdf},

year  = {2005},

date = {2005-10-01},

booktitle = {3rd International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 05)},

address = {Banff, Alberta, Canada},

abstract = {While storytelling has long been recognized as an important part of effective knowledge management in organizations, knowledge management technologies have generally not distinguished between stories and other types of discourse. In this paper we describe a new type of technological support for storytelling that involves automatically capturing the stories that people tell to each other in conversations. We describe our first attempt at constructing an automated story extraction system using statistical text classification and a simple voting scheme. We evaluate the performance of this system and demonstrate that useful levels of precision and recall can be obtained when analyzing transcripts of interviews, but that performance on speech recognition data is not above what can be expected by chance. This paper establishes the level of performance that can be obtained using a straightforward approach to story extraction, and outlines ways in which future systems can improve on these results and enable a wide range of knowledge socialization applications.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_commonsense_2005,

title = {Commonsense Psychology and the Functional Requirements of Cognitive Models},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Commonsense%20Psychology%20and%20the%20Functional%20Requirements%20of%20Cognitive%20Models.pdf},

year  = {2005},

date = {2005-07-01},

booktitle = {American Association of Artificial Intelligence Workshop on Modular Construction of Human-Like Intelligence},

publisher = {AAAI Press},

address = {Pittsburgh, PA},

abstract = {In this paper we argue that previous models of cognitive abilities (e.g. memory, analogy) have been constructed to satisfy functional requirements of implicit commonsense psychological theories held by researchers and nonresearchers alike. Rather than working to avoid the influence of commonsense psychology in cognitive modeling research, we propose to capitalize on progress in developing formal theories of commonsense psychology to explicitly define the functional requirements of cognitive models. We present a taxonomy of 16 classes of cognitive models that correspond to the representational areas that have been addressed in large-scale inferential theories of commonsense psychology. We consider the functional requirements that can be derived from inferential theories for one of these classes, the processes involved in human memory. We argue that the breadth coverage of commonsense theories can be used to better evaluate the explanatory scope of cognitive models, as well as facilitate the investigation of larger-scale cognitive systems.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hobbs_encoding_2005,

title = {Encoding Knowledge of Commonsense Psychology},

author = {Jerry R. Hobbs and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Encoding%20Knowledge%20of%20Commonsense%20Psychology.pdf},

year  = {2005},

date = {2005-05-01},

booktitle = {7th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning},

address = {Corfu, Greece},

abstract = {Introduction: In previous papers (Gordon and Hobbs, 2003, 2004) we have described a methodology for determining what knowledge should be included in the knowledge base for an intelligent agent, capable of constructing and executing plans to achieve its goals. An intelligent agent is at least a planning mechanism, so Gordon (2004) asked what concepts are necessary for the common strategies that people use in achieving their goals. He investigated ten different domains, including politics, personal relationships, artistic performance, and warfare, and collected 372 strategies. He authored representations of these strategies in order to identify a controlled vocabulary involving of concepts. These concepts were categorized into 48 different representational areas, such as sets, space, and time. Thirty of the representational areas, involving 635 concepts, were concerned with commonsense psychology; among these are memory, knowledge management, planning, and so on. This result by itself demonstrates the very great importance of commonsense psychology in the construction of intelligent agents. Gordon et al. (2003) then, to define further each of the representational areas, augmented the list of concepts by investigating the English language expressions for concepts in each area. The result was a list of 528 concepts, a set that identifies the target coverage of a formal theory of commonsense psychology. The authors began the development of formal theories that would encompass this list of concepts. In our earlier work (Gordon and Hobbs, 2003), we described the first theory we constructed, memory, as an illustration of the method. We have now completed 14 of the 30 theories, and this paper provides an overview of this work as we close in on the halfway mark.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{swanson_automated_2005,

title = {Automated Commonsense Reasoning About Human Memory},

author = {Reid Swanson and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Automated%20Commonsense%20Reasoning%20About%20Human%20Memory.pdf},

year  = {2005},

date = {2005-03-01},

booktitle = {AAAI Spring Symposium on Metacognitive Computing},

address = {Stanford, CA},

abstract = {Metacognitive reasoning in computational systems will be enabled by the development of formal theories that have broad coverage over mental states and processes as well as inferential competency. In this paper we evaluate the inferential competency of an existing formal theory of commonsense human memory by attempting to use it to validate the appropriateness of a commonsense memory strategy. We formulate a particular memory strategy (to create an associated obstacle) as a theorem in first-order predicate calculus. We then attempt to validate this strategy by showing that it is entailed by the axioms of the theory we evaluated. These axioms were encoded into the syntax of an automated reasoning system, which was used to automatically generate inferences and search for formal proofs.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hobbs_toward_2005,

title = {Toward a Large-scale Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology for Metacognition},

author = {Jerry R. Hobbs and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Toward%20a%20Large-scale%20Formal%20Theory%20of%20Commonsense%20Psychology%20for%20Metacognition.pdf},

year  = {2005},

date = {2005-03-01},

booktitle = {American Association of Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium on Metacognitive Computing},

address = {Stanford, CA},

abstract = {Robust intelligent systems will require a capacity for metacognitive reasoning, where intelligent systems monitor and reflect on their own reasoning processes. A large-scale study of human strategic reasoning indicates that rich representational models of commonsense psychology are available to enable human metacognition. In this paper, we argue that large-scale formalizations of commonsense psychology enable metacognitive reasoning in intelligent systems. We describe our progress toward developing 30 integrated axiomatic theories of commonsense psychology, and discuss the central representational challenges that have arisen in this work to date.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gandhe_first_2004,

title = {First Steps Toward Linking Dialogues: Mediating Between Free-text Questions and Pre-recorded Video Answers},

author = {Sudeep Gandhe and Andrew S. Gordon and Anton Leuski and David Traum},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/First%20Steps%20Toward%20Linking%20Dialogues-%20Mediating%20Between%20Free-text%20Questions%20and%20Pre-recorded%20Video%20Answers.pdf},

year  = {2004},

date = {2004-12-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th Army Science Conference},

address = {Orlando, FL},

abstract = {Pre-recorded video segments can be very compelling for a variety of immersive training purposes, including providing answers to questions in after-action reviews. Answering questions fluently using pre-recorded video poses challenges, however. When humans interact, answers are constructed after questions are posed. When answers are pre-recorded, even if a correct answer exists in a library of video segments, the answer may be phrased in a way that is not coherent with the question. This paper reports on basic research experiments with short "linking dialogues" that mediate between the question and answer to reduce (or eliminate) the incoherence, resulting in more natural human-system interaction. A set of experiments were performed in which links were elicited to bridge between questions from users of an existing training application and selected answers from the system, and then comparisons made with unlinked answers. The results show that a linking dialogue can significantly increase the perceived relevance of the system's answers.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group, Virtual Humans},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hill_learning_2004,

title = {Learning the Lessons of Leadership Experience: Tools for Interactive Case Method Analysis},

author = {Randall W. Hill and Andrew S. Gordon and Julia Kim},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/LEARNING%20THE%20LESSONS%20OF%20LEADERSHIP%20EXPERIENCE-%20TOOLS%20FOR%20INTERACTIVE%20CASE%20METHOD%20ANALYSIS.pdf},

year  = {2004},

date = {2004-12-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th Army Science Conference},

address = {Orlando, FL},

abstract = {The Army Excellence in Leadership (AXL) project at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies is aimed at supporting the acquisition of tacit knowledge of military leadership through the development of compelling filmed narratives of leadership scenarios and interactive training technologies. The approach taken in the AXL project is to leverage the best practices of case-method teaching and use Hollywood storytelling techniques to create fictional case studies (as filmed media) addressing specific leadership issues. In addition to authoring compelling cases for analysis, we have developed software prototypes that instantiate the case-method teaching approach. These systems engage individual trainees in human-computer dialogues that are focused on the leadership issues that have been embedded in the fictional cases.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{iuppa_bringing_2004,

title = {Bringing Hollywood Storytelling Techniques to Branching Storylines for Training Applications},

author = {Nicholas Iuppa and Gershon Weltman and Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Bringing%20Hollywood%20Storytelling%20Techniques%20to%20Branching%20Storylines%20for%20Training%20Applications.PDF},

year  = {2004},

date = {2004-08-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference for Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments},

address = {Edinburgh, Scotland},

abstract = {This paper describes the value of capitalizing on Hollywood storytelling techniques in the design of story-based training applications built around branching storylines. After reviewing the design of Outcome-Driven Simulations and the technical aspects of our application prototype, we describe storytelling techniques that greatly improve the level of user engagement in training simulations based on this design. These techniques concern the overall development of the story, the use of a story arc, the critical decisions in a story, notions of pay off and climax, dramatic sequences, character bibles, characters as a Greek chorus, and the significance of consequences and outcomes. Examples of each of these storytelling techniques are given in the context of the ICT Leaders Project, a prototype leadership development application for the US Army.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_expressions_2004,

title = {Expressions Related to Knowledge and Belief in Children's Speech},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Anish Nair},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Expressions%20Related%20to%20Knowledge%20and%20Belief%20in%20Childrens%20Speech.PDF},

year  = {2004},

date = {2004-08-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci)},

publisher = {Lawrence Erlbaum Associates},

address = {Chicago, IL},

abstract = {Children develop certain abilities related to Theory of Mind reasoning, particularly concerning the False-belief Task, between the ages of 3 and 5. This paper investigates whether there is a corresponding change in the frequency of linguistic expressions related to knowledge and belief produced by children around these ages. Automated corpus analysis techniques are used to tag each expression related to knowledge and belief in a large corpus of transcripts of speech from normally developing English-learning children. Results indicate that the frequency of expressions related to knowledge and belief increases steadily from the beginning of children's language production. Tracking of individual concepts related to knowledge and belief indicates that there are no clear qualitative changes in the set of concepts that are expressed by children of different ages. The implications for the relationship between language and the development of Theory of Mind reasoning abilities in children are discussed.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_authoring_2004,

title = {Authoring Branching Storylines for Training Applications},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Authoring%20Branching%20Storylines%20for%20Training%20Applications.PDF},

year  = {2004},

date = {2004-06-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS)},

address = {Santa Monica, CA},

abstract = {Progress in the area of interactive training applications has led to the formulation of methodologies that have been successfully transitioned out of research labs and into the practices of commercial developers. This paper reviews the academic origins of a methodology for developing training applications that incorporate branching storylines to engage users in a firstperson learn-by-doing experience, originally referred to as Outcome-Driven Simulations. Innovations and modifications to this methodology from the commercial sector are then reviewed, and the steps in this methodology are described, as implemented in current best practices. Finally, new research efforts based on this methodology are examined, including the introduction of natural language processing technology to enable human-computer conversations and the integration of branching storylines into real-time virtual reality environments. A prototype application to support leadership development within the U.S. Army that includes these advances is described.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_tough_2004,

title = {Tough Love Between Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Tough%20Love%20Between%20Artificial%20Intelligence%20and%20Interactive%20Entertainment.PDF},

year  = {2004},

date = {2004-02-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of IE2004: Australian Workshop on Interactive Entertainment},

address = {Sydney, Australia},

abstract = {Burgeoning interest in Interactive Entertainment has led many computer scientists with roots in Artificial Intelligence toward the exploration of ideas in mass-market entertainment applications. Increasing numbers of workshops, journals, and funding programs for Interactive Entertainment indicate that AI researchers in this area have a good sense for following hot new trends, but are they vanguards of a fruitful science or misguided opportunists? In this IE2004 invited talk, I'll explore the relationship between AI research and the Interactive Entertainment field, from its seductive courtship through its rocky marriage, and offer some relationship advice for the future.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_branching_2004,

title = {Branching Storylines in Virtual Reality Environments for Leadership Development},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Michael Lent and Martin Velson and Paul Carpenter and Arnav Jhala},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Branching%20Storylines%20in%20Virtual%20Reality%20Environments%20for%20Leadership%20Development.pdf},

year  = {2004},

date = {2004-01-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 16th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-04)},

pages = {844–851},

publisher = {AAAI Press},

address = {San Jose, CA},

abstract = {Simulation-based training is increasingly being used within the military to practice and develop the skills of successful soldiers. For the skills associated with successful military leadership, our inability to model human behavior to the necessary degree of fidelity in constructive simulations requires that new interactive designs be developed. The ICT Leaders project supports leadership development through the use of branching storylines realized within a virtual reality environment. Trainees assume a role in a fictional scenario, where the decisions that they make in this environment ultimately affect the success of a mission. All trainee decisions are made in the context of natural language conversations with virtual characters. The ICT Leaders project advances a new form of interactive training by incorporating a suite of Artificial Intelligence technologies, including control architectures, agents of mixed autonomy, and natural language processing algorithms.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{hill_guided_2003,

title = {Guided Conversations about Leadership: Mentoring with Movies and Interactive Characters},

author = {Randall W. Hill and Jay Douglas and Andrew S. Gordon and Frédéric Pighin and Martin Velson},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Guided%20Conversations%20about%20Leadership-%20Mentoring%20with%20Movies%20and%20Interactive%20Characters.pdf},

year  = {2003},

date = {2003-08-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference},

address = {Acapulco, Mexico},

abstract = {Think Like a Commander - Excellence in Leadership (TLAC-XL) is an application designed for learning leadership skills both from the experiences of others and through a structured dialogue about issues raised in a vignette. The participant watches a movie, interacts with a synthetic mentor and interviews characters in the story. The goal is to enable leaders to learn the human dimensions of leadership, addressing a gap in the training tools currently available to the U.S. Army. The TLAC-XL application employs a number of Artificial Intelligence technologies, including the use of a coordination architecture, a machine learning approach to natural language processing, and an algorithm for the automated animation of rendered human faces.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_recognizing_2003,

title = {Recognizing Expressions of Commonsense Psychology in English Text},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Abe Kazemzadeh and Anish Nair and Milena Petrova},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Recognizing%20Expressions%20of%20Commonsense%20Psychology%20in%20English%20Text.PDF},

year  = {2003},

date = {2003-07-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)},

address = {Sapporo, Japan},

abstract = {Many applications of natural language processing technologies involve analyzing texts that concern the psychological states and processes of people, including their beliefs, goals, predictions, explanations, and plans. In this paper, we describe our efforts to create a robust, large-scale lexical-semantic resource for the recognition and classification of expressions of commonsense psychology in English Text. We achieve high levels of precision and recall by hand-authoring sets of local grammars for commonsense psychology concepts, and show that this approach can achieve classification performance greater than that obtained by using machine learning techniques. We demonstrate the utility of this resource for large-scale corpus analysis by identifying references to adversarial and competitive goal in political speeches throughout U.S. history.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_literary_2003,

title = {Literary Evidence for the Cultural Development of a Theory of Mind},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Anish Nair},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Literary%20Evidence%20for%20the%20Cultural%20Development%20of%20a%20Theory%20of%20Mind.PDF},

year  = {2003},

date = {2003-07-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci)},

address = {Boston, MA},

abstract = {The term Theory of Mind is used within the cognitive sciences to refer to the abilities that people have to reason about their own mental states and the mental states of others. An important question is whether these abilities are culturally acquired or innate to our species. This paper outlines the argument that the mental models that serve as the basis for Theory of Mind abilities are the product of cultural development. To support this thesis, we present evidence gathered from the large-scale automated analysis of text corpora. We show that the Freudian conception of a subconscious desire is a relatively modern addition to our culturally shared Theory of Mind, as evidenced by a shift in the way these ideas appeared in 19th and 20th century English language novels.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_experience_2003,

title = {Experience Management Using Storyline Adaptation Strategies},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Nicholas Iuppa},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Experience%20Management%20Using%20Storyline%20Adaptation%20Strategies.PDF},

year  = {2003},

date = {2003-03-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the First International Conference on Technologies for Digital Storytelling and Entertainment},

address = {Darmstadt, Germany},

abstract = {The central problem of creating interactive drama is structuring a media experience for participants such that a good story is presented while enabling a high degree of meaningful interactivity. This paper presents a new approach to interactive drama, where pre-authored storylines are made interactive by adapting them at run-time by applying strategies that react to unexpected user behavior. The approach, called Experience Management, relies heavily on the explication of a broad range of adaptation strategies and a means of selecting which strategy is most appropriate given a particular story context. We describe a formal approach to storyline representation to enable the selection of applicable strategies, and a strategy formalization that allows for storyline modification. Finally, we discuss the application of this approach in the context of a story-based training system for military leadership skills, and the direction for continuing research.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_coverage_2003,

title = {Coverage and Competency in Formal Theories: A Commonsense Theory of Memory},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Jerry R. Hobbs},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Coverage%20and%20Competency%20in%20Formal%20Theories-%20A%20Commonsense%20Theory%20of%20Memory.PDF},

year  = {2003},

date = {2003-03-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning},

address = {Stanford University},

abstract = {The utility of formal theories of commonsense reasoning will depend both on their competency in solving problems and on their concemptual coverage. We argue that the problems of coverage and competency can be decoupled and solved with different methods for a given commonsense domain. We describe a methodology for identifying the coverage requirements of theories through the large-sclae analysis of planning strategies, with further refinements made by collecting and categorizing instances of natural language expressions pertaining to the domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology in identifying the representational coverage requirements of theories of the commonsense psychology of human memory. We then apply traditional methods of formalization to produce a formal first-order theory of commonsense memory with a high degree of competency and coverage.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_theory_2002,

title = {The Theory of Mind in Strategy Representations},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/The%20Theory%20of%20Mind%20in%20Strategy%20Representations.PDF},

year  = {2002},

date = {2002-08-01},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci)},

publisher = {Lawrence Erlbaum Associates},

address = {George Mason University},

abstract = {Many scientific fields continue to explore cognition related to Theory of Mind abilities, where people reason about the mental states of themselves and others. Experimental and theoretical approaches to this problem have largely avoided issues concerning the contents of representations employed in this class of reasoning. In this paper, we describe a new approach to the investigation of representations related to Theory of Mind abilities that is based on the analysis of commonsense strategies. We argue that because the mental representations of strategies must include concepts of mental states and processes, the large-scale analysis of strategies can be informative of the representational scope of Theory of Mind abilities. The results of an analysis of this sort are presented as a description of thirty representational areas that organize the breadth of Theory of Mind concepts. Implications for Theory Theories and Simulation Theories of Theory of Mind reasoning are discussed.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_virtual_2002,

title = {Virtual Humans as Participants vs. Virtual Humans as Actors},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon and Michael Lent},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Virtual%20Humans%20as%20Participants%20vs%20Virtual%20Humans%20as%20Actors.PDF},

year  = {2002},

date = {2002-03-01},

booktitle = {AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment},

address = {Stanford University},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

@inproceedings{gordon_enabling_2002,

title = {Enabling and recognizing strategic play in strategy games: Lessons from Sun Tzu},

author = {Andrew S. Gordon},

url = {http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Enabling%20and%20recognizing%20strategic%20play%20in%20strategy%20games-%20Lessons%20from%20Sun%20Tzu.PDF},

year  = {2002},

date = {2002-03-01},

booktitle = {The 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment},

address = {Stanford University},

abstract = {The interactive entertainment genre of the strategy game entertains users by allowing them to engage in strategic play, which should encourage game designers to devote development efforts toward facilitating users that wish to employ commonsense strategies, and to recognize and react to specific user strategies during game play. This paper attempts to facilitate these development efforts by identifying and analyzing 43 strategies from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, which are broadly applicable across games in the strategy game genre. For each strategy, a set of specific actions are identified that should be provided to users to enable their execution, along with generalized recognition rules that can facilitatethe design of entertaining responses to users' strategic behavior. Consideration of how the enabling actions could be incorporated into an existing strategy game is provided.},

keywords = {The Narrative Group},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}