Melissa Roemmele

melissa @ roemmele.io | CV/Resume | LinkedIn | GitHub

I'm a Research Scientist at RWS Language Weaver in Los Angeles. I develop interactive applications that use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to facilitate content understanding and creation. My particular research passion involves the use of computers to analyze and augment human creativity in language and storytelling. More broadly, I'm interested in using AI to expand the possibilities of language-based interaction between people and machines.

In 2018, I received my PhD in the Department of Computer Science at University of Southern California. My thesis "Neural Networks for Narrative Continuation" explored machine learning approaches to automatically predicting 'what happens next' in text-based stories (see the one-page abstract or the full text). As a PhD student, I worked as a research assistant in the Narrative Group led by my advisor Andrew Gordon at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Before coming to USC, I completed a Master's degree in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University. As an undergraduate I studied Psychology and Linguistics at Miami University, where I was also part of the Diving team.

Media

  • ACM Chicago talk about AI-augmented creative writing. video | slides
  • ACM Article: "Engineering Additional Creativity". html

Software

  • InSentive: expand any list of words into a creative sentence. demo | code
  • Creative Help: generate the next sentence in a story. demo | code

Publications (also on Google Scholar).

  • Roemmele, M., Shaffer, K., Olsen, K., Wang, Y., and DeNeefe, S. (2023). AbLit: A Resource for Analyzing and Generating Abridged Versions of English Literature. 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023). pdf
  • Roemmele, M. (2021). Inspiration through Observation: Demonstrating the Influence of Automatically Generated Text on Creative Writing. 12th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2021). pdf | video | slides | summary
  • Roemmele, M., Sidhpura, D., DeNeefe S., and Tsou, L. (2021). AnswerQuest: A System for Generating Question-Answer Items from Multi-Paragraph Documents. 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021), Demo Track. pdf | poster | article
  • Roemmele, M. (2019). Identifying Sensible Lexical Relations in Generated Stories. Workshop on Narrative Understanding at the 2019 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2019). pdf
  • Roemmele, M. and Gordon, A. (2018) Linguistic Features of Helpfulness in Automated Support for Creative Writing. Storytelling Workshop at the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2018). pdf
  • Roemmele, M. and Gordon, A. (2018) An Encoder-decoder Approach to Predicting Causal Relations in Stories. Storytelling Workshop at the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL 2018). pdf
  • Roemmele, M. (2018) Neural Networks for Narrative Continuation. PhD Thesis. University of Southern California. pdf
  • Roemmele, M. and Gordon, A. (2018) Automated Assistance for Creative Writing with an RNN Language Model. Demo at the 2018 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2018). pdf
  • Roemmele, M. and Gordon, A. (2017) Lexical preferences in an automated story writing system. Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, at the Thirty-First Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017). pdf
  • Cychosz, M., Gordon, A., Odimegwu, O., Connolly, O., Bellassai, J., and Roemmele, M. (2017) Effective Scenario Designs for Free-text Interactive Fiction. 10th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS-2017). pdf
  • Bellassai, J., Gordon, A., Roemmele, M., Cychosz, M., Odimegwu, O., and Connolly, O. (2017) Unsupervised Text Classification for Natural Language Interactive Narratives. Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT10). pdf
  • Roemmele, M., Gordon, A., and Swanson, R. (2017) Evaluating Story Generation Systems Using Automated Linguistic Analyses. Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity, at the 23rd SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2017). pdf
  • Roemmele, M., Mardo, P., and Gordon, A. (2017) Natural-language Interactive Narratives in Imaginal Exposure Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology Workshop (CLPsych), at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2017). pdf
  • Roemmele, M., Kobayashi, S., Inoue, N., and Gordon, A. (2017) An RNN-based Binary Classifier for the Story Cloze Test. Linking Models of Lexical, Sentential and Discourse-level Semantics Workshop (LSDSem), at the 2017 European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2017). pdf
  • (Blog post) Roemmele, M. and Heilman, M. (2016) Interpreting and Visualizing Neural Networks for Text Processing. html
  • Roemmele, M., Morgens, S., Gordon, A., and Morency, L. (2016) Recognizing Human Actions in the Motion Trajectories of Shapes. 2016 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2016). pdf
  • Roemmele, M. (2016) Writing Stories with Help from Recurrent Neural Networks. Doctoral Consortium at the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16). pdf
  • Roemmele, M. and Gordon, A. (2015) Creative Help: A Story Writing Assistant. Eighth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS-2015). pdf
  • Maslan, N., Roemmele, M., and Gordon, A. (2015) One Hundred Challenge Problems for Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Psychology. Twelfth International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning (Commonsense-2015). pdf
  • Maslan, N., Roemmele, M., and Gordon, A. (2015) An Integrated Evaluation of Perception, Interpretation, and Narration. Beyond the Turing Test Workshop, at the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15). pdf
  • Gordon, A. and Roemmele, M. (2014) An Authoring Tool for Movies in the Style of Heider and Simmel. Seventh International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS-2014). pdf
  • Roemmele, M., Archer-McClellan, H., and Gordon, A. (2014) Triangle Charades: A Data-Collection Game for Recognizing Actions in Motion Trajectories. 2014 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2014). pdf
  • Wienberg, C., Roemmele, M., and Gordon, A. (2013) Content-Based Similarity Measures of Weblog Authors. The 4th Annual ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci'13). pdf
  • Gordon, A., Kozareva, Z., and Roemmele, M. (2012) SemEval-2012 Task 7: Choice of Plausible Alternatives: An Evaluation of Commonsense Causal Reasoning. 6th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2012), at the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2012). pdf
  • Roemmele, M., Bejan, C., and Gordon, A. (2011) Choice of Plausible Alternatives: An Evaluation of Commonsense Causal Reasoning. Tenth International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning (Commonsense-2011). pdf