Call for Papers for the 4th Games and Natural Language Processing Workshop (GAMNLP-19) to be held at the 14th Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG-19).
August 26 or 27, 2019 in San Luis Obispo, California, USA
The field of Natural Language Processing (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 investigates computational and theoretical aspects of natural language research that would be beneficial for designing and building novel game experiences, or for processing texts to conduct formal game studies. NLP would benefit from games in obtaining language resources (e.g., construction of a thesaurus or a parser through a crowdsourcing game), or in learning the linguistic characteristics of game users as compared to those of other domains.
The workshop explores the overlap between the two fields and promotes interaction and collaboration among researchers and practitioners. Despite advances in both games and language research, language as a gameplay mechanism remains a largely unexplored area, often because of the lack of accessible and domain-specific NLP technologies. Language technologies must strike a balance between predictability, creativity, and authorial burden. This often results in a trade-off between using machine learning or neural network based NLP approaches, which cover a wide range of language processing but with limited explanability, and hand-crafted or structured language models, which guarantee finer language control but could limit the scope of the interactions or functionality of a system. This workshop invites both theoretical and applied contributions and we invite authors to reflect on these trade-offs.
Some examples of work that would be appropriate for GAMNLP include:
- Game design, usability, and mechanics based on natural language interfaces
- Novel uses of natural language processing or generation as a game mechanic
- Player immersion in language-enabled mixed reality or physically embodied games
- Narrative plot or text generation of text-based interactive narrative systems
- Narrative or story-arc comprehension
- Discourse planning and dialogue management in games
- Natural language understanding and generation of character dialogue
- Analysis of large-scale game-related corpora (e.g., game reviews, gameplay logs)
- Real-time sentiment analysis of player discourse or chat
- Summarization of gameplay or real-time commentary for games
- Serious games for learning languages
- Gamification of natural language processing tasks
- Lessons from historical applications of natural language processing in games, including post-mortems
- Ethical and privacy concerns of ownership of text and audio chat in massively multiplayer online games
- Natural language in games as an alternative method of input for people with disabilities
Important Dates:
April 5, 2019: Full papers and position papers due (via https://easychair.org/conferen
May 3, 2019: Notifications to authors
June 7, 2019: Return camera-ready papers to organizers (via https://easychair.org/conferen
July 26, 2019: Late-breaking and work-in-progress papers due to organizers (via gamnlp19@googlegroups.com)
August 26 – 30, 2019: Conference and Workshop (exact day TBD)
Submissions
Full papers will present original research and be 5-6 pages in length, excluding references. Papers will be reviewed by at least three reviewers. Full papers will be presented as talks. If we do not receive enough submissions or meet the acceptance rate of FDG, we may not be able to publish the workshop proceedings in the ACM Digital Library.
Position papers will allow authors to raise thought-provoking discussions within the research community. Submissions are limited to 2 page extended abstracts and will be presented as short talks.
Late-breaking and work-in-progress papers will showcase ongoing work and focused, relevant contributions. Submissions need not present original work and are limited to 2 page extended abstracts. These papers will be presented as short or lightning talks. Authors will retain the copyright to their work so that they may submit to other venues as their work matures.
All submissions must be formatted following the ACM style guidelines https://www.acm.org/publicatio