NIL Natural Interaction based on Language

On Monday 31st January, our Faculty has received the visit of a group of ENS Cachan students. They came from Paris to known about the research we are doing here.

Federico Peinado gave them a talk about Language, Storytelling and Videogames, presenting our research group and his own work in the field.

Merci beaucoup for your visit, folks!

The UMIREC corpus, ellaborated in collaboration with the Genesis research group at MIT, is publicly available. This corpus comprises 62 files in English (30 folktales and 32 Wall Street Journal articles) annotated with the location of referring expressions, coreference relations between the referring expressions, and the descriptive and distinctive information associated to the referring expressions.

The corpus can be downloaded in http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/54766.

Pablo Gervás ha presentado sus poetas automáticos, en una entrevista en directo, en la Compañía de Radio Televisión de Galicia (CRTVG).

Pablo Gervás ha colaborado en la redacción del libro "¿Puede un computado escribir un poema de amor?" junto a Dionisio Cañas y Carlos González Tardón. La presentación tuvo lugar el martes de 13 de abril del 2010 en el Centro Cultural Blanquerna.

As a continuation of some issues related to her thesis, Raquel Hervás has completed a research stay of six months at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. In collaboration with the Genesis research group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Raquel has applied some ideas from her thesis to the analysis of referring expressions in narrative texts and newspaper articles. Her visit has also created collaboration links between both groups and the definition of different lines of common future work.

Game Guru, a pedagogical adventure game about the videogame industry created by Federico Peinado, has won the best game award of the CVEEL'09 Seminar at the Facultad de Informática UCM.

A beta version is available to download. The final version will be released after this summer.

Pablo Gervás has been invited to the Purple Blurb that will be celebrated the next Wednesday May 20, 6pm-7pm, at MIT in room 14E-310.

Purple Blurb is a free and open-to-the public event. It started in Fall 2007 and it has been organized by Nick Montfort, assistant professor of digital media. Purple Blurb is a serial of conferences about digital writing. As it's sayd in Purple Blurb webpage, digital writing is "any work where computation and digital media intersect with writing practices, including creative and nonfiction ones".

Daniel Dionne and Salvador de la Puente, with Carlos León, Pablo Gervás and Raquel Hervás, went to ENGL09 in Athenas.

Daniel and Salvador submit their GUIDE system, a virtual guiding software, to the 1st GIVE challenge and obtaining great results as we can saw at the challenge journal of the workshop.

Also, they presented their first paper, A Model for Human Readable Instruction Generation Using Level-Based Discourse Planning and Dynamic Inference of Attributes Disambiguation describing a valid modular architecture to design and produce virtual guiding systems focused on the capabilities of the final users.

NIL's researcher Carlos León will attend the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity thanks to a grant he has received from the National Science Foundation (award #IIS-0906244).