NIL Natural Interaction based on Language

Ing. Rodrigo García Sánchez, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, visited Madrid for a research colaboration with the NIL group from February to July 2006.

NIL researcher Raquel Hervás carried out a research visit at the Creative Systems Lab, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal , within the framework of Spanish-Portuguese Integrated Action HP2003-0068, from 11th January to 11th February.

NIL researchers Raquel Hervás and Pablo Gervás from UCM visit the Creative Systems Lab, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal , within the framework of Spanish-Portuguese Integrated Action HP2003-0068, from 5th to 8th December 2005.

Charles Callaway, from the University of Edimburgh, to give a talk at UCM on "Dialogue, Discourse Markers, and other Linguistic Elements that Improve Narrative Generation", Sala de Grados, Facultad de Informática, 11:30.

NIL kick-off workshop to present ongoing research. The following NIL members described their current work:

• Jesús Herrera de la Cruz: recognising textual entailment
• Jose Ramón Pérez Agüera: automatic construction of thesaurus for information retrieval
• Raquel Hervás Ballesteros: flexible implementation of NLG modules
• Federico Peinado Gil: generating stories using ontologies

NIL researchers Federico Peinado and Pablo Gervás from UCM visit the Creative Systems Lab, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal , within the framework of Spanish-Portuguese Integrated Action HP2003-0068, from 7th-13th October 2005.

The Second Joint workshop on Computational Creativity takes place as part of the workshop programme of IJCAI 2005. This workshop is organised by Pablo Gervás (NIL, UCM), Alison Pease (University of Edimburgh), and Tony Veale (University College Dublin).

Federico Peinado made a research stay at Forschergruppe Narratologie, Hamburg Universität at Hamburg, Germany. He worked with PD Dr. Jan Christoph Meister on his Story Generation Algorithms project (23rd May 2005 / 3rd July 2005)

The WASP family of automatic poets is presented at the Feria del Libro de Madrid. A brief presentation on poetry generated by computers was followed by a live demonstration of how the WASPos convert a message provided by the user into formal Spanish verse. An informal chat followed, with the participation of (human) poet María Sáinz.

This is what the press had to say about the event:

• El Pais digital, 8th June 2005
• Libertad Digital, 10th June 2005

Dr. Rafael Pérez y Pérez, developer of the MEXICA story-telling system, visited the Facultad de Informática for a working meeting with NIL researchers. The aim of the meeting was to consider possible future lines of colaboration between the MEXICA and ProtoPropp projects.