Lara J. Martin, PhD
Assistant Professor at the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Human-Centered AI, Applied NLP, Neurosymbolic Methods, Automated Story Generation, AAC, Dungeons and Dragons AI
Researcher
How to say Lara
I make systems that improve how people talk with computers and to each other through computers. Most of my career so far has been teaching computers how to tell stories (also known as automated story generation) and working my way towards an AI Dungeon Master. I am also currently working on Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and speech technologies.
I run the LARA Lab and am a member of the Interactive Robotics and Language Lab (IRAL). My pronouns are she/they.
News
- 12/1/2024 - I am a guest editor for a IEEE Transactions on Games special issue on Large Language Models and Games! Submissions are due December 1st!
- 8/16/2024 - Hosted the Wordplay Workshop at ACL with my co-organizers. – Bangkok, Thailand
- 8/16/2024 - Our paper on BERALL, the system that uses RAG to generate interactive fiction games, was accepted to the Wordplay Workshop at ACL 2024!
- 6/24/2024 - Foad Hamidi and I have won a COEIT Interdisciplinary Proposal award and will be working on "Investigating the Social and Affective Aspects of Large-Language Model-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems" together.
- 4/18/2024 - Gave a talk at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence – Baltimore, MD
- 2/16/2024 - Gave a talk at Johns Hopkins University – Baltimore, MD
- 10/8/2023 - CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Master's Assistants was presented at AIIDE 2023 – Salt Lake City, UT
- 10/4/2023 - Gave a talk at the University of Maryland, College Park's Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) Colloquium – College Park, MD
- 10/8/2023 - CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Master's Assistants was presented at AIIDE 2023 – Salt Lake City, UT
- 8/19/2023 - Andrew Zhu's work on CALYPSO was featured in The Register.
- 7/9/2023 - A demo paper on "Human-in-the-Loop Schema Induction" was also published at ACL 2023! – Toronto, Canada
- 7/9/2023 - Two papers were published at ACL 2023! One in the main conference (FIREBALL) and one in Findings of ACL (CoRRPUS) – Toronto, Canada
- 6/5/2023 - Presented the paper "Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community" at ICWSM 2023, which came out of a class project from my Spring 2022 class on Interactive Fiction and Text Generation – Limassol, Cyprus
- 4/21/2023 - Gave the keynote talk at Northeastern University's NULab Spring Conference on "Digital Bards: How Dungeons & Dragons will Make for Better AI" – Boston, MA
- 2/27/2023 - Gave a guest talk for UMBC's Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department – Baltimore, MD
- 2/15/2023 - Gave a guest talk for Drexel's Information Science department – Philadelphia, PA
- 12/14/2022 - Featured in a Penn Engineering Magazine article about Next-Gen Innovators.
- 5/5/2022 - Gave a guest talk for USC ISI's NL (Natural Language) Seminar – Los Angeles, CA
- 1/13/2022 - 5/10/2022 - Co-taught a graduate course on Interactive Fiction and Text Generation with Chris Callison-Burch at UPenn.
- 11/29/2021 - Gave a guest talk for UCSC's CM (Computational Media) Seminar – Santa Cruz, CA (Virtual)
- 11/30/2021 - Gave a guest lecture for UPenn's NLP class.
- 10/14/2021 - Arranged the Doctoral Consortium at AIIDE 2021 – Virtual
- 6/11/2021 - Co-organized the Third Workshop on Narrative Understanding – Virtual
- 4/30/2021 - Gave a guest lecture for the University of Kentucky's Interactive Narrative (Topics in AI) class – Lexington, KY (Virtual)
- 3/15/2021 - The corresponding podcast to the Science Focus article is out!
- 2/12/2021 - My profile piece with BBC Science Focus magazine is available for purchase!
- 1/25/2021 - Gave a talk for UPenn's CLUNCH (Computational Linguistics Lunch) group
- 1/11/2021 - Started working at UPenn – Philadelphia, PA
- 12/7/2020 - Passed my defense!
- 10/19/2020 - 10/23/2020 - Publicity Co-Chair for AIIDE 2020! – Virtual
- 9/11/2020 - Gave a talk for Georgia Tech's NLP Seminar Series – Atlanta, GA
- 8/11/2020 - Awarded a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellowship!
- 7/9/2020 - Co-organized the First Joint Workshop on Narrative Understanding, Storylines, and Events (NUSE)
- 4/16/2020 - Article: Meet ML@GT: Lara J. Martin Trains AI Agents to Become Storytellers
- 2/28/2020 - Featured in an article on Wired, where I talk about where the future of AI should be going.
- 2/7/2020 - Presented at AAAI – New York City, NY
- 2/4/2020 - Article: Changing the Conversation: Georgia Tech Researchers Provide New Approach to Automated Story Generation
- 11/10/2019 - Paper on "Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences" has been accepted at AAAI 2020!
- 10/30/2019 - Won the Foley Scholar Award!
- 10/8/2019 - Local Arrangements Chair for AIIDE 2019 – Atlanta, GA
- 9/18/2019 - Attended the Tapia Doctoral Consortium and won Best Doctoral Consortium Presentation (Slides here.) – San Diego, CA
- 8/10/2019 - Presented at IJCAI – Macau, China
- 8/1/2019 - Attended the 2nd Storytelling Workshop at ACL – Florence, Italy
- 4/22/2019 - Passed my proposal!
Contact
Research Accounts
Google Scholar
Google ScholarEverything else
Github Research Gate Semantic Scholar Academia.edu ORCID Web of Science dblp arXiv ScopusBiography
Biography
About Me
My research interests include:
human-AI communication/collaboration
- computational creativity
- interactive narrative
- narrative generation & understanding
- dialog systems & conversational agents
- cognitive systems
and computer-mediated human-human communication
- augmentative & alternative communication (AAC)
- prosody & emotion (affective computing)
- speech synthesis (text-to-speech)
- social media analysis
- natural language processing/language technologies,
- linguistics,
- human-computer interaction,
- cognitive science,
- and artifical intelligence.
Some of my non-research passions include AI equity, science communication, and educating children about computer science and technology.
Check out my CV for more information.
Third-Person Bio
Dr. Lara J. Martin (she/they) is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the CSEE department, researching human-centered artificial intelligence with a focus on natural language processing applications. They have worked in the areas of automated story generation, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools, AI for tabletop roleplaying games, speech processing, and affective computing—publishing in top-tier conferences such as AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, and IJCAI.
They have also been featured in Wired and BBC Science Focus magazine.
Previously, Dr. Martin was a 2020 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania working with Dr. Chris Callison-Burch. She earned her PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked with Dr. Mark Riedl. She also has a MS in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science & Linguistics from Rutgers University—New Brunswick.
Teaching
Teaching
CMSC 491/691 Interactive Fiction and Text Generation
Fall 2024University of Maryland, Baltimore County
CIS 700 Interactive Fiction and Text Generation
Spring 2022University of Pennsylvania
Co-taught with Dr. Chris Callison-Burch
CS 3790 Introduction to Cognitive Science
Summer 2018Georgia Institute of Technology
Media
Media
Hallucinating ChatGPT finds a role playing Dungeons & Dragons by Thomas Claburn for The Register.
Aug 19, 2023.
Next-Gen Innovators: Penn Engineering Postdoctoral Fellows Lead the Way on Groundbreaking Research by Amy Biemiller for Penn Engineering Magazine.
Fall 2022.
Lara Martin: "How Can I get a system to tell a story about anything I want?" by Masoud Golsorkhi for TANK Magazine, Issue 88 (Narrative).
Autumn 2021.
Talks
Talks
9/11/2020 - Georgia Tech's NLP Seminar Series
5/5/2022 - USC's Natural Language Seminar
2/16/2024 - Johns Hopkins University's Center for Language & Speech Processng (CLSP)
Blog
Blog
01
JulChatGPT will not replace writers...unless we let it
What you should and shouldn't be concerned about when it comes to your writing job. · 4 minute read
It looks like the Writers Guild (the union for people who write movies and TV...
Read More
21
JunNo, LaMDA Isn't Sentient
I explain at a high level why LaMDA can't be sentient. · 5 minute read
[Expanded from a Facebook post of mine, originally posted June 14, 2022.] You might have...
Read MoreFun Facts
Fun Facts
I have been collecting a list of American English idioms for foreign friends.
I created a machine translation system with Vivian Robison for translating the Bible from LOLspeak to English.
I am a downloadable voice in the speech synthesis tool Festvox (voice "US English Female LJM").
I presented at SIGBOVIK 2015 (a fake conference) on "Language Sequencing: Language as a Physical Entity" with Meghana Kshirsagar.
© Lara J. Martin. All rights reserved. Last updated Nov 13, 2024.
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