Josep Valls-Vargas

Josep Valls-Vargas
Amazon · Department of Computer Science

PhD in Computer Science

About

14
Publications
2,239
Reads
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136
Citations
Additional affiliations
December 2017 - present
Amazon
Position
  • Researcher
September 2012 - December 2017
Drexel University
Position
  • Research Assistant

Publications

Publications (14)
Article
Storytelling and story generation systems usually require knowledge about the story world to be encoded in some form of knowledge representation formalism, a notoriously time-consuming task requiring expertise in storytelling and knowledge engineering. In order to alleviate this authorial bottleneck, in this paper we propose an end-to-end computati...
Article
Computational narrative systems usually require knowledge about the story world and narrative theory to be encoded in some form of structured knowledge representation formalism, a notoriously time-consuming task requiring expertise in both storytelling and knowledge engineering. In this paper we present an approach that combines supervised machine...
Article
Existing work on player modeling often assumes that the play style of players is static. However, our recent work shows evidence that players regularly change their play style over time. In this paper we propose a novel player modeling framework to capture this change by using episodic information and sequential machine learning techniques. In part...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In parallel programming, there is a shift away from the single execution path of sequential programming to situations where non-deterministic operation force consideration of multiple paths of execution. Compared to the substantial computer science education literature on helping students to learn sequential programming, there are fewer studies of...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In the context of a learning game to teach parallel programming, we describe a procedural content generation (PCG) approach that can be controlled to generate programming puzzles involving a desired set of concepts, and of desired size and "difficulty". Our approach is based on grammars to control the generation of the puzzle structure, and orthogr...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper we present a survey of two of the main areas of research within the field of computational narrative, namely narrative analysis and generation. We argue that there is a gap between these two lines of work and propose a taxonomy of the computational models of narrative used within each. We outline potential mappings between computation...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Modern computing is increasingly handled in a parallel fashion, however, little is known about how individuals learn parallel programming. This paper focuses on the design of an educational game called Parallel, designed for both teaching parallel programming education for CS undergraduate curricula, as well as for gathering insights into how stude...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, we present our method for automatically extracting narrative information of characters and their narrative roles from natural language stories. In our corpus of 15 unannotated folk tales, our Voz system identifies 87% of the characters in the stories and correctly assigns 68% of the character roles. To better understand the sources...
Article
Full-text available
We present the preliminary work in the TAEMILE project, which aims to co-regulate the learning process in educational games by automatically balancing learners autonomy and the pedagogical processes intended by educators. We focus on our design rationale and the initial results from our user study.
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents an approach for automatically identifying high-level narrative structure information, particularly character roles, from unannotated folk tales. We introduce a new representation called action matrices to encode Propp's narrative theory on character role and their "sphere of action." We tested our approach in a fully automated s...
Conference Paper
Some computer game genres require meaningful stories and complex worlds in order to successfully engage players. In this paper we look at a procedural approach to story-based map generation focusing on the tight relationship between stories and the virtual worlds where those stories will unfold. Our long term goal is to develop procedural content g...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we propose a method for automatically assigning narrative roles to characters in stories. To achieve this goal our proposal is to combine natural language processing techniques with domain knowledge extracted from Propp's morphology of the folktale.
Article
Often, computer games require meaningful stories and complex worlds in order to successfully engage players. Developing a high-quality story and rich characters can be one of the hardest tasks in the game development process. Narrative is a key element in building game worlds for interactive digital entertainment. I am particularly interested in co...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Natural Language Generation (NLG) is one of the longstanding problems in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we focus on a subproblem in NLG, namely surface realization through text modification: given a source sentence and a desired change, produce a grammatically correct and semantically coherent sentence that implements the desired change. T...

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