Research Colloquium at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, SFU Surrey presents:

Andrew Gordon

March 11, 2009 at 2:30 pm

SFU Surrey Campus, Room 5380 (5th Floor Galleria)

Harnessing the experiences of millions of weblog storytellers

The rise of Internet weblogs has opened a new channel for the sharing of personal stories of everyday experiences. Many of the stories in weblogs focus on the mundane: another day at the office, a conversation with a friend, an argument with spouse, or a boring night at home watching television. However, the remarkable scale of storytelling on the web creates new opportunities for the quantitative analysis of everyday life. In this talk I will describe our research on the collection and analysis of personal stories in Internet weblogs on a massive scale. I'll describe our work in creating corpora of millions of personal stories using statistical text classification techniques. I'll discuss the difficulties in analyzing the text of weblog stories, particularly with respect to the causal and temporal relationships between sentences and clauses. I'll outline a research agenda for using weblog stories as a knowledge base for automated reasoning about everyday events, and present a prototype technology that takes the form of a text-based interactive storytelling application.

Andrew Gordon is a Research Scientist and Research Associate Professor at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. He is the author of the 2004 book, Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 1999.

To be added to this announcement list, please email siat.colloquium@gmail.com with the word "subscribe" in the subject line. More information on speakers, presentations, and colloquium here: http://siat-rc.pbwiki.com