The NLDS lab at UCSC focuses on computational modeling of dialogue and user generated content in social media such as weblogs. Current research projects include:

    1. Athena: An Alexa Prize Challenge 3 team, consisting of 7 lab members competing in the 2019/2020 Alexa Prize. 
    2. Neural Natural Language Generation: Projects on restaurant descriptions and recommendations, on question generation, and on story generation. There are projects that focus on controllable NLG, controlling style or sentence planning operations, also work on NLG across domains using transfer learning
    3. Computational modeling of first-person affect in user-generated content, in private microblogs, blogs and datasets such as HappyDB.  
    4. Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue manager optimization
    5. Retrieval methods for dialogue interaction, developing new models of dialogue coherence for open-domain dialogue. 
    6. Computational modeling of narrative structure and narrative generation.  

The Natural Language and Dialogue Systems lab is located at Engineering 2 rooms 387 and 392.

Please see the menu on the left for people, publications, software, and projects associated with the lab.