CS Colloq: Information Retrieval for Virtual Worlds

Title: Information Retrieval for Virtual WorldsSpeaker: Dr. Anton Leuski (ICT)ABSTRACT:
Computer simulated virtual worlds have become increasingly important
in recent years. These worlds range from off-line setups where a
single person interacts with a single computer generated character to
massive on-line worlds where tens of thousands of people come
together interacting with each other and numerous virtual characters.
More and more people are using these computer-simulated environments
for education, training, communication, and entertainment. These
worlds are becoming a source for acquiring and polishing real-world
skills. They are also getting used for modeling and analysis of real-world human behavior patterns. Creating effective tools both for
analysis and construction of virtual words is highly important.In this talk I will show how statistical natural language processing
(NLP) techniques can be applied to address this problem. In the first
part of the talk I will discuss how to use NLP approaches such as
language modeling and conditional random fields to build virtual
characters capable of natural language understanding (NLU). I will
describe three different methods for creating NLU subsystems for
virtual characters of different complexities. I will focus my
presentation on a novel text classification algorithm that supports
creation of simple and effective virtual characters. This algorithm
builds on ideas from cross-lingual information retrieval. I will
describe experiments that show that the algorithm outperforms
traditional classification techniques and remains very robust in the
presence of partially correct language input. In the second part of
the talk, I will show how statistical language modelling, text
classification and clustering can be applied to analyze players'
conversations in an online virtual world and how this analysis can be
used to detect interesting player activities, players participating
in those activities, and interaction patterns.BIO:
Dr. Anton Leuski is a Research Scientist at the Institute for Creative
Technologies with the University of Southern California. He holds a Ph.D. in
Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His
research interests center around interactive information access,
human-computer interaction, and machine learning. Dr. Leuski's recent work has
focused on natural language problems that facilitate dialog between humans and
virtual characters, specifically language understanding and classification,
natural language generation, and activity detection and tracking in massive
collaborative environments.

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Colloquia