Philipp Wicke

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich | LMU · Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS)

Political debates are a peculiar type of political discourse, in which candidates directly confront one another, addressing not only the the moderator's questions, but also their opponent's statements, as well as the concerns of voters from both parties and undecided voters. Therefore, language is adjusted to meet specific expectations and achieve...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240010.].

The development of assistive robotic agents to support household tasks is advancing, yet the underlying models often operate in virtual settings that do not reflect real-world complexity. For assistive care robots to be effective in diverse environments, their models must be robust and integrate multiple modalities. Consider a caretaker needing ass...

In the field of Geriatronics, enabling effective and transparent communication between humans and robots is crucial for enhancing the acceptance and performance of assistive robots. Our early-stage research project investigates the potential of language-based modulation as a means to improve human-robot interaction. We propose to explore real-time...

Languages differ in how they divide up the world into concepts and words; e.g., in contrast to English, Swahili has a single concept for `belly' and `womb'. We investigate these differences in conceptualization across 1,335 languages by aligning concepts in a parallel corpus. To this end, we propose Conceptualizer, a method that creates a bipartite...

Figurative language is a challenge for language models since its interpretation is based on the use of words in a way that deviates from their conventional order and meaning. Yet, humans can easily understand and interpret metaphors, similes or idioms as they can be derived from embodied metaphors. Language is a proxy for embodiment and if a metaph...

We are moving towards a future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) based agents make many decisions on behalf of humans. From healthcare decision-making to social media censoring, these agents face problems, and make decisions with ethical and societal implications. Ethical behaviour is a critical characteristic that we would like in a human-centric...

The world is heading towards a state in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) based agents make most decisions on behalf of humans. From healthcare decision making to social media censoring, these agents face problems and make decisions that have ethical and societal implications. Hence, ethical behaviour is a critical characteristic of a human-centri...

Acting, stand-up and dancing are creative, embodied performances that nonetheless follow a script. Unless experimental or improvised, the performers draw their movements from much the same stock of embodied schemas. A slavish following of the script leaves no room for creativity, but active interpretation of the script does. It is the choices one m...

Acting, stand-up and dancing are creative, embodied performances that nonetheless follow a script. Unless experimental or improvised, the performers draw their movements from much the same stock of embodied schemas. A slavish following of the script leaves no room for creativity, but active interpretation of the script does. It is the choices one m...

The words we use to talk about the current epidemiological crisis on social media can inform us on how we are conceptualizing the pandemic and how we are reacting to its development. This paper provides an extensive explorative analysis of how the discourse about Covid-19 reported on Twitter changes through time, focusing on the first wave of this...

The words we use to talk about the current epidemiological crisis on social media can inform us on how we are conceptualizing the pandemic and how we are reacting to its development. This paper provides an extensive explorative analysis of how the discourse about Covid-19 reported on Twitter changes through time, focusing on the first wave of this...

We describe the design and implementation of a multi-modal storytelling system. Multiple robots narrate and act out an AI-generated story whose plots can be dynamically altered via non-verbal audience feedback. The enactment and interaction focuses on gestures and facial expression, which are embedded in a computational framework that draws on cogn...

Doctors and nurses in these weeks and months are busy in the trenches, fighting against a new invisible enemy: Covid-19. Cities are locked down and civilians are besieged in their own homes, to prevent the spreading of the virus. War-related terminology is commonly used to frame the discourse around epidemics and diseases. The discourse around the...

The task of translating text to images holds some valid creative potential and has been the subject of study in Computational Creativity. In this paper, we present preliminary work focused on emoji translation. The work-in-progress system is based on techniques of information retrieval. We compare the performance of our system with three deep learn...

To a human storyteller, a story is more than a textual artifact. Rather, as stories are both generated and generative, each is also a blueprint for performances to come. Tellers must draw on their own bodily affordances – from voice and gesture to movement around a stage – to bring stories to life, much as a conductor and an orchestra must translat...

Stories are made to be told, yet the computational generation of stories has principally focused on stories as textual artifacts, rather than on the telling, or indeed the performance, of stories. The performative aspect of stories, in which a teller brings a tale to life, requires more than the written word. We humans use our bodies to enact a sto...

AI for People believes that technology should respect the anthropocentric principle, being at the service of people, not vice-versa. With this poster, we aim to inform people about the organisation, our projects and ways of getting involved and hopefully foster discussions about the responsibility of research and industry with respect to Artifcial...

An increasingly large body of converging evidence supports the idea that the semantic system is distributed across brain areas and that the information encoded therein is multimodal. Within this framework, feature norms are typically used to operationalize the various parts of meaning that contribute to define the distributed nature of conceptual r...

Doctors and nurses in these weeks are busy in the trenches, fighting against a new invisible enemy: Covid-19. Cities are locked down and civilians are besieged in their own homes, to prevent the spreading of the virus. War-related terminology is commonly used to frame the discourse around epidemics and diseases. Arguably the discourse around the cu...

We present a robotic storytelling system, named Scealability, which augments a symbolic story-generation system with embodied, robot actors to physically enact a story with the congruent use of space, gesture and voice. We describe the system and summarize the empirical evidence as to the benefits of embodied story-telling.

Creativity is perhaps our most complex cognitive phenomenon. It is a subject of investigation in many fields, from Neuroscience to Artificial Intelligence [1, 2]. Research in the latter has even given rise to a dedicated sub-field of its own, Computational Creativity (or CC), which focuses primarily on the generation and appreciation of creative ar...

We humans often compensate for our own weaknesses by partnering with those with complementary strengths. So fiction is full of characters who complete each other, just as show-business thrives on successful double acts.If it works for humans, then why not for our machines? The comparative strengths and weaknesses of different CC systems are well-do...

Presentation of the paper "Duets Ex Machina:On The Performative Aspects of “Double Acts” in Computational Creativity by Tony Veale, Philipp Wicke and Thomas Mildner at the ICCC19.

Report for the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 19172 "Computational Creativity Meets Digital Literary Studies", held from April 22 to April 25, 2019.

Telling a story requires the internal interrogation and reassembly of our memories of situated actions in past events. Expressing those actions in a context of embodied story-telling often allows for, or even demands, the use of physical gestures. We believe that such gestures are most effective when they make use of the recurrent spatial patterns...

An automated storytelling system that presents its stories as text on a screen is limited in its engagement with readers. An embodied robotic agent can overcome these limitations by using gesture to physically enact its stories. This paper presents a robotic agent that enacts its own novel stories, which it shapes from the feedback it obtains using...

With the increasing availability of commercial humanoid robots, the domain of computational storytelling has found a tool that combines linguistics with its physical originator, the body. We present a framework that evolves previous research in this domain, from a focus on the analysis of expressiveness towards a focus on the potential for creative...

Storytelling is one of the most natural ways for humans to exchange experiences and to express internal considerations. Creative stories can convey feelings, morals and insights. They can make us rethink our own values and concepts by providing a new perspective. The field of computational storytelling attempts to automate the process of storytell...

Our everyday virtual communication underwent a shift in recent years, when the Unicode Standard introduced Emoji (Unicode-Standard, since 2000), the set of more than one thousand pictograms, which became a standard in most of our online messaging services. Now Emoji are a substantial part of our virtual communication with more and more words becomi...