Creative language – the sort found in novels, film, and comics – contains a wide range of linguistic phenomena, from phrasal and sentential syntactic complexity to high-level discourse structures such as narrative and character arcs. In this talk, I explore how we can use deep learning to understand, generate, and answer questions about creative language. I begin by presenting deep neural network models for two tasks involving creative language understanding: 1) modeling dynamic relationships between fictional characters in novels, for which our models achieve higher interpretability and accuracy than existing work; and 2) predicting dialogue and artwork from comic book panels, in which we demonstrate that even state-of-the-art deep models struggle on problems that require commonsense reasoning. Next, I introduce deep models that outperform all but the best human players on quiz bowl, a trivia game that contains many questions about creative language. Shifting to ongoing work, I describe a neural language generation method that disentangles the content of a novel (i.e., the information or story it conveys) from the style in which it is written. Finally, I conclude by integrating my work on deep learning, creative language, and question answering into a future research plan to build conversational agents that are both engaging and useful. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Creative language – the sort found in novels, film, and comics – contains a wide range of linguistic phenomena, from phrasal and sentential syntactic complexity to high-level discourse structures such as narrative and character arcs. In this talk, I explore how we can use deep learning to understand, generate, and answer questions about creative language. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":378374,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[13556,13545],"msr-video-type":[206954],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-session-type":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"msr-episode":[],"msr-research-theme":[],"class_list":["post-378347","msr-video","type-msr-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-human-language-technologies","msr-video-type-microsoft-research-talks","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/Dm_pMTI1SLQ","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_video_file":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/378347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-video"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/378347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":808582,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/378347\/revisions\/808582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-video-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video-type?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-session-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-session-type?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-episode","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-episode?post=378347"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-theme?post=378347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}