Master's Student of HSE University-St Petersburg Presents His Project at Conference on Natural Language in Japan
Alexander Migal, 2nd-year student of the Master's programme 'Language Technology in Business and Education', spoke at the conference 'International Natural Language Generation Conference' (INLG) on natural language which took place in Japan. At the event, he presented the results of the team project—a competition in generating fanfics about the Harry Potter universe.
The conference INLG has taken place in Japan for the seventeenth time. It gathered industry representatives, novice and experienced researchers in the sphere of natural language.
Alexander Migal participated in this conference for the first time. He presented a report about the Long Story Generation Challenge. The project participants used programmes, which can generate fanfics about the Harry Potter university based on 1000 words. The code was created by students of the Master's programme ‘Language Technology in Business and Education' together with a group of enthusiasts. The texts received in the programmes were given to linguist volunteers who assessed their plot, coherence and style. Besides, the generated fanfics were mixed with the real ones, and the volunteers mathematically assessed how AI artwork is different from the regular.
'In our project, fanfics were a certain intermediate link between a full-fledged novel which is impossible to generate and a short literary text, which AI handles easily. We opted for the Harry Potter universe due to its versatility: it is familiar to readers from all over the world, and we also have the warmest feelings for it,—shares Alexander Migal.—The results of our research showed that a living text is ahead of the generated in terms of quality and artistic value. However, sometimes, the volunteers confused the texts written by people and the programme. As researchers, we are obviously happy about it but as the viewers of the series 'Black Mirror' are a little scared'.
The curators of the student work were Nikolay Mikhaylovsky, Chief Officer of the company NTRLab, and Anastasia Kolmogorova, Academic Supervisor of the Master's programme 'Language Technology in Business and Education'. You can have a look at the generated texts and the code via the link.
Alexander Migal, 2nd-year student of the Master's programme 'Language Technology in Business and Education'
The INLG conference was my first serious experience of performing in English. Usually, it doesn't take me much time to prepare for a presentation—in Russian, improvisation is much easier for me. However, this time, I had to work hard: I rehearsed the speech lots of times and learnt the key moments by heart. It seems to me that my efforts paid off—the participants actively asked me questions and came up to me during a break to thank me for the report and exchange contacts. I really hope to come to Japan to the conference again: I am sure I will have something to share.