Natural language processing (NLP) investigates computational aspects of natural language, languages that humans use to communicate and understand. While the field of NLP ranges from theoretical studies (e.g., parsing algorithms, computational models of dialogue) to practical applications (e.g., information retrieval, conversational agents, machine translation), this workshop will focus on NLP in games. In particular, the workshop aims at exploring the overlap between the two fields and promoting interaction and collaboration among researchers and practitioners of the fields for mutual benefit. For example, games could benefit from NLP's sophisticated human language technologies in designing natural and engaging dialogues to bring novel game experiences, or in processing texts to conduct formal game studies. Conversely, NLP could benefit from games in obtaining language resources (e.g., construction of a thesaurus through a crowdsourcing game), or in learning the linguistic characteristics of game users as compared to those of other domains.

The Workshop has been successfully held twice before: the 1st workshop in 2012 (GAMNLP-12) as a special session at the 8th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (JapTAL 2012), and the 2nd workshop in 2013 (GAMNLP-13) at the 6th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2013). To continue to promote the cross-feeding between the two fields, the 3rd workshop is organized as a (full-day) workshop at the Tenth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-14).

The workshop will welcome the participation of both academics and industry practitioners interested in the use of NLP in games or vice versa.

Topics of Interest

• Text-based Interactive Narrative Systems
• Narrative comprehension
• Narrative generation
• Text realization

• Discourse planning and management in games
• Dialogue management
• Natural language understanding and generation
• Question answering and question generation

• Information and content extraction, text mining
• Analysis of large-scale game-related corpora (e.g. reviews, gameplay logs)
• Sentiment analysis of player discourse/chat
• Summarization of gameplay
• Real-time commentary for games

• Natural language interaction in games
• Speech recognition and synthesis in games and in-game chat systems
• Language-based real-time interaction with virtual characters
• Chatterbots and conversational agents
• Context-aware systems in virtual environment

• Automated construction of game ontologies
• Serious and educational games for learning languages
• Games for the purpose of constructing language resources

Organizing Committee

Noriko Tomuro, DePaul University <tomuro@cs.depaul.edu>
Kristy Boyer, North Carolina State University <keboyer@ncsu.edu>
Yun-Gyung Cheong, IT University of Copenhagen <yugc@itu.dk>