Call for Papers

The Games and NLP workshop will examine the use of games and gamification for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, as well as how NLP research can advance player engagement and communication within games. The Games and NLP workshop aims to promote and explore the possibilities for research and practical applications of games and gamification that have a core NLP aspect, either to generate resources and perform language tasks or as a game mechanic itself. This workshop investigates computational and theoretical aspects of natural language research that would be beneficial for designing and building novel game experiences, or for processing texts to conduct formal game studies. NLP would benefit from games in obtaining language resources (e.g., construction of a thesaurus or a parser through a crowdsourcing game), or in learning the linguistic characteristics of game users as compared to those of other domains.

Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

* Games for collecting data useful for NLP (games in planning, under development, or deployed)
* Gamification of NLP tasks (techniques, best practice and evaluation of gamification strategies)
* Player motivation and experience (strategies for recruitment/retention and player profiling)
* Game design (conceptual design elements and reports of success and/or failure of designs)
* Novel uses of natural language processing or generation as a game mechanic
* Natural language in games as an alternative method of input for people with disabilities
* Processing NLP game data (aggregation methods and strategies for minimising noise and cheating)
* Analysis of large-scale game-related corpora (e.g., game reviews, gameplay logs)
* Real-time sentiment analysis of player discourse or chat
* Evaluation of games for NLP (metrics for evaluating game performance, evaluating player performance, motivation and bias, and evaluating task difficulty)
* Serious games for learning languages
* Player immersion in language-enabled mixed reality or physically embodied games
* Narrative plot or text generation of text-based interactive narrative systems
* Natural language understanding and generation of character dialogue
* Ethical and privacy concerns related to games (e.g., ownership of text and audio chat in massively multiplayer online games)

We encourage participants to share frequently used metrics for assessing game and player performance, further instructions for how to produce these can be found on our workshop website.

LRE 2020 Map and the "Share your LRs!" initiative

"When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).

As scientific work requires accurate citations of referenced work so as to allow the community to understand the whole context and also replicate the experiments conducted by other researchers, LREC 2020 endorses the need to uniquely Identify LRs through the use of the International Standard Language Resource Number (ISLRN, www.islrn.org), a Persistent Unique Identifier to be assigned to each Language Resource. The assignment of ISLRNs to LRs cited in LREC papers will be offered at submission time.

Important Dates:

14th February 2020: Submission Deadline
13th March 2020: Notification of Acceptance
2nd April 2020: Camera Ready Deadline
11th May 2020: Workshop Date

Submissions

We invite submissions of full papers (8 pages), short papers (4 pages), and extended abstracts (2 pages). Page lengths are excluding references and metrics.

Full and short papers will present original research and appear in the workshop proceedings. Full and short papers will be presented as talks or at the poster and demo session, and the proceedings published on the LREC 2020 website.

Extended abstracts will showcase demonstrations, works in progress, and position papers. These papers will be non-archival and will provide authors with the opportunity to showcase ongoing work and focused, relevant contributions. All authors will be sent feedback and final decision of acceptance. Extended abstracts will be presented as lightning talks and at the poster and demo session, where participants can play the games that have been discussed.

All submissions must be formatted following the LREC style guidelines https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/en/submission2020/authors-kit/ (Word, OpenOffice, and LaTeX templates are available).

Submissions should be made via the START conference system https://www.softconf.com/lrec2020/GAMESandNLP/.

Review Process
Full and short papers will be reviewed double blind by at least two of the programme committee before a meta-review by the organisers (so, please take care to anonymise your submissions). We encourage authors to take whatever space they need; papers will be judged on the merit of their ideas, not length.

Extended abstracts will be reviewed by the organising committee. These submissions will be reviewed single blind by two of the programme committee before a meta-review by the organisers.

We acknowledge the difficulty of attending these events in person. For those with personal, financial, or political inability for travel we are happy to organize remote presentations.