Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reinforcement Learning

Language-modeling--based approaches to story plot generation attempt to construct a plot by sampling from a language model (LM) to predict the next character, word, or sentence to add to the story. LM techniques lack the ability to receive guidance from the user to achieve a specific goal, resulting in stories that don't have a clear sense of progression and lack coherence. We present a reward-shaping technique that analyzes a story corpus and produces intermediate rewards that are backpropagated into a pre-trained LM in order to guide the model towards a given goal. Automated evaluations show our technique can create a model that generates story plots which consistently achieve a specified goal. Human-subject studies show that the generated stories have more plausible event ordering than baseline plot generation techniques.Comment: Published in IJCAI 201

Itchy Nose : discreet gesture interaction using EOG sensors in smart eyewear

We propose a sensing technique for detecting finger movements on the nose, using EOG sensors embedded in the frame of a pair of eyeglasses. Eyeglasses wearers can use their fingers to exert different types of movement on the nose, such as flicking, pushing or rubbing. These subtle gestures can be used to control a wearable computer without calling attention to the user in public. We present two user studies where we test recognition accuracy for these movements.Postprin