Wordplay: When Language Meets Games @ ACL 2024


Your one stop shop for all things interactive narrative + AI!

Back to the '80s

Overview



Date and time: August 16, 2024
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Virtual links: TBD


This workshop focused on exploring the utility of interactive narratives, think everything from classic text-adventures like Zork to modern Twine games, to fill a role as the learning environments of choice for language-based tasks including but not limited to storytelling. A few previous iterations of this workshop took place very successfully with hundreds of attendees, at NeurIPS 2018, NeurIPS 2020, & NAACL 2022. Since then, the community of people working in this area has rapidly increased. This workshop aims to be a centralized place where all researchers involved across a breadth of fields can interact and learn from each other. Furthermore, it will act as a showcase to the wider NLP/RL/Game communities on interactive narrative’s place as a learning environment. The program will feature a collection of invited talks in addition to contributed talks and posters from each of these sections of the interactive narrative community and the wider NLP and RL communities.

We like all things:

  • Interactive narrative: game playing RL agents, game generation, etc.
  • Interactive language learning
  • Natural language generation
  • Improvisational storytelling
  • And more! Anything you can think of that involves narrative, interactivity, and language!


    Check out the full version of our overview!

Call For Papers



Submission website: OpenReview
Submission deadline: Apr 19, 2024, 23:59 (Anywhere On Earth)
Author notification: May 24, 2024
We welcome original research papers ranging between 4-8 pages in length (not including references or supplementary materials), formatted according to the ACL 2023 style. Submissions should be in .pdf format. Since the review process is double-blind, all papers should be appropriately anonymised. Authors have the option of including supplementary manuscript containing further details of their work into the same .pdf file, it is entirely up to the reviewers to decide whether they wish to consult this additional material. Authors are strongly encouraged to make data and code publicly available whenever possible. The accepted papers will be posted on the workshop website and will not appear in the ACL proceedings.

In addition, we welcome extended abstracts of up to 2 pages that describe open problems and challenges in this area. The papers will be non-archival, we welcome papers that have been published or submitted to other places. However, authors are required to acknowledge their papers’ original appearance in such cases.

All accepted papers and extended abstracts will be presented as posters. The program committee will select a few papers for oral presentation.

Organizers


Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

MosaicML & University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

Marc-Alexandre Côté

Marc-Alexandre Côté

Microsoft Research

Belinda Zou Li

Belinda Zou Li

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Lara J. Martin

Lara J. Martin

University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

Nanyun (Violet) Peng

Nanyun (Violet) Peng

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Alane Suhr

Alane Suhr

University of California, Berkeley

Ronen Tamari

Ronen Tamari

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Laetitia Teodorescu

Laetitia Teodorescu

Inria, France

Adam Trischler

Adam Trischler

Microsoft Research

Jason Weston

Jason Weston

Meta AI Research

Xingdi Yuan

Xingdi Yuan

Microsoft Research