Andrew S. Gordon is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. He leads interdisciplinary research on storytelling and the human mind, exploring how people experience, interpret, and narrate the events in their lives. A central focus of his research is on the abstract knowledge that enables interpretation of experiences, including the expectations that people have of everyday activity contexts and the commonsense theories that people have of their own psychology. In support of his research goals, he has pioneered methods for collecting and analyzing personal storytelling on a massive scale, identifying tens of millions of narratives posted to Internet weblogs. He has used this collection in a variety of innovative applications using novel information retrieval and natural language processing techniques, particularly in the areas of commonsense causal reasoning, story-based learning environments, and comparative analyses of health-related personal experiences. He is the author of the 2004 book, Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from Northwestern University.

Groups

Member of the Institute for Creative Technologies

Faculty in the Department of Computer Science

Leader of the Narrative Group

Projects

Neurobiology of Narrative Framing

Heider-Simmel Interactive Theater

Authoring Realistic Learning Environments with Stories

Students

Melissa Roemmele

Christopher Wienberg

Reid Swanson, PhD (2010)

Notable

Program co-chair for K-CAP 2013

Choice of Plausible Alternatives

Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge (2004)

Popular press

2013

Sagae, K., Gordon, A., Dehghani, M., Metke, M., Kim, J., Gimbel, S., Tipper, C., Kaplan, J., and Immordino-Yang, M. (2013) A Data-Driven Approach for Classification of Subjectivity in Personal Narrative. 2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, August 4-6, 2013, Hamburg, Germany.

Wienberg, C., Roemmele, M., and Gordon, A. (2013) Content-Based Similarity Measures of Weblog Authors. The 4th Annual ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci-13), May 2-4, 2013, Paris, France. pdf

2012

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2012) Say Anything: Using Textual Case-Based Reasoning to Enable Open-Domain Interactive Storytelling. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems 2(3). info

Wienberg, C. and Gordon, A. (2012) PhotoFall: Discovering Weblog Stories Through Photographs. Proceedings of The 21st ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM-2012), October 29-November 2, 2012, Maui, HI. pdf

Gordon, A., Wienberg, C., and Sood, S. (2012) Different Strokes of Different Folks: Searching for Health Narratives in Weblogs. 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, September 3-5, 2012, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pdf

Gordon, A., Kozareva, Z., and Roemmele, M. (2012) SemEval-2012 Task 7: Choice of Plausible Alternatives: An Evaluation of Commonsense Causal Reasoning. Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2012), June 7-8, 2012, Montreal, Canada. pdf

Campbell, A., Wienberg, C., and Gordon, A. (2012) Collecting Relevance Feedback on Titles and Photographs in Weblog Posts. Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI-12), February 14-17, 2012, Lisbon, Portugal. pdf

2011

Hobbs, J. and Gordon, A. (2011) The Deep Lexical Semantics of Emotions. In Khurshid Ahmad (ed) Affective Computing and Sentiment Analysis: Emotion, Metaphor and Terminology. Text, Speech and Language Technology Vol 45, New York: Springer, pp. 27-34. pdf

Tomai, E., Thapa, L., Gordon, A., and Kang, S. (2011) Causality in Hundreds of Narratives of the Same Events. The Fourth Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT4), 2011 AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE), Stanford, CA, October 10-14, 2011. pdf

Gordon, A., Bejan, C., and Sagae, K. (2011) Commonsense Causal Reasoning Using Millions of Personal Stories. Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11), August 7-11, 2011, San Francisco, CA. pdf

Mulkar-Mehta, R., Gordon, A., Hobbs, J., and Hovy, E. (2011) Causal Markers Across Domains and Genres of Discourse. The Sixth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2011) June 25-29, 2011, Banff, Alberta, Canada. pdf

Gordon, A., Hobbs, J. and Cox, M. (2011) Anthropomorphic Self-Models for Metareasoning Agents. In M. Cox and A. Raja (Eds.) Metareasoning: Thinking about thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 295-305. info

Roemmele, M., Bejan, C., and Gordon, A. (2011) Choice of Plausible Alternatives: An Evaluation of Commonsense Causal Reasoning. AAAI Spring Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Stanford University, March 21-23, 2011. pdf

Gordon, A. and Hobbs, J. (2011) A Commonsense Theory of Mind-Body Interaction. AAAI Spring Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Stanford University, March 21-23, 2011. pdf

2010

Wansbury, T., Hart, J., Gordon, A., and Wilkinson, J. (2010) UrbanSim: Training Adaptable Leaders in the Art of Battle Command. Proceedings of the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), Orlando, FL, November 29 - December 2, 2010. pdf

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2010) A Data-Driven Case-Based Reasoning Approach to Interactive Storytelling. The Third International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2010), Edinburgh, UK, November 1-3, 2010. pdf

Gordon, A. (2010) Mining Commonsense Knowledge From Personal Stories in Internet Weblogs. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction, Grenoble, France, May 17-19, 2010. pdf

Gerber, M., Gordon, A., and Sagae, K. (2010) Open-domain Commonsense Reasoning Using Discourse Relations from a Corpus of Weblog Stories. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Formalisms and Methodology for Learning by Reading (FAM-LbR) NAACL 2010 Workshop, Los Angeles, CA, June 6, 2010. pdf

Hobbs, J. and Gordon, A. (2010) Goals in a Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2010), Toronto, Canada, May 11-14, 2010. pdf

2009

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2009) Say Anything: A Demonstration of Open Domain Interactive Digital Storytelling. 2009 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS-09), Guimarães, Portugal, December 9-11, 2009. pdf

Sagae, K. and Gordon, A. (2009) Clustering Words by Syntactic Similarity Improves Dependency Parsing of Predicate-Argument Structures. International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT-09), Paris, France, October 7-9, 2009. pdf

McAlinden, R., Gordon, A., Lane, H. C., and Pynadath, D. (2009) UrbanSim: A Game-based Simulation for Counterinsurgency and Stability-focused Operations. Workshop on Intelligent Educational Games, 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Brighton, England, July 7, 2009. pdf

Gordon, A. and Swanson, R. (2009) Identifying Personal Stories in Millions of Weblog Entries. Third International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Data Challenge Workshop, San Jose, CA, May 20, 2009. pdf

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2009) Open Domain Collaborative Storytelling With Say Anything. Third International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, San Jose, CA, May 17-20, 2009. pdf

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2009) A Comparison of Retrieval Models for Open Domain Story Generation. AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, Stanford, CA, March 23-25, 2009. pdf

Gordon, A. (2009) Story-Based Learning Environments. In Nicholson, D., Schmorrow, D., & Cohn, J. (eds.) The PSI Handbook of Virtual Environments for Training and Education: Developments for the Military and Beyond, Volume 2: Components and Training Technologies. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. info

2008

McAlinden, R., Durlach, P., Lane, H., Gordon, A., and Hart, J. (2008) UrbanSim: A game-based instructional package for conducting counterinsurgency operations. Proceedings of the 26th Army Science Conference, Orlando, FL, December 1-4, 2008. pdf

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2008) Say Anything: A Massively Collaborative Open Domain Story Writing Companion. First International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Erfurt, Germany, November 26-29, 2008. pdf

Gordon, A. (2008) Story Management Technologies for Organizational Learning. International Conference on Knowledge Management, Special Track on Intelligent Assistance for Self-Directed and Organizational Learning, Graz, Austria, September 3-5, 2008. pdf

Gordon, A. and Swanson, R. (2008) Envisioning With Weblogs. International Conference on New Media Technology, Special Track on Knowledge Acquisition From the Social Web, Graz, Austria. September 3-5, 2008. pdf

Gordon, A., Hobbs, J. and Cox, M. (2008) Anthropomorphic self-models for metareasoning agents. AAAI Workshop on Metareasoning: Thinking about thinking. July 13-14, 2008, Chicago, IL. pdf

Hobbs, J. and Gordon, A. (2008) The Deep Lexical Semantics of Emotions. Workshop on Sentiment Analysis: Emotion, Metaphor, Ontology and Terminology (EMOT-08), 6th International conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-08), Marrakech, Morocco, May 27, 2008. pdf

Manshadi, M., Swanson, R., and Gordon, A. (2008) Learning a Probabilistic Model of Event Sequences From Internet Weblog Stories. Twenty-first International Conference of the Florida AI Society, Applied Natural Language Processing track, May 15-17, 2008, Coconut Grove, FL. pdf

Gordon, A. and Swanson. R. (2008) StoryUpgrade: Finding Stories in Internet Weblogs. Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, March 31-April 2, 2008, Seattle, WA. pdf

Swanson, R., Chew, E., and Gordon, A. (2008) Supporting Musical Creativity With Unsupervised Syntactic Parsing. Creative Intelligent Systems, AAAI Spring Symposium Series, March 26-28, 2008, Stanford University. pdf

Gordon, A., Havasi, C., Lux, M., and Strohmaier, M. (2008) Common Sense and Goal-Oriented Interfaces. Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. January 13-16, 2008, Canary Islands, Spain. pdf workshop

2007

Gordon, A., Cao, Q., and Swanson, R. (2007) Automated Story Capture From Internet Weblogs. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, October 28-31, 2007, Whistler, BC. pdf

Gordon, A. and Swanson, R. (2007) Generalizing semantic role annotations across syntactically similar verbs. Proceedings of the 2007 meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-07), Prague, Czech Republic, June 23-30, 2007. pdf

2006

Hill, R., Kim, J., Gordon, A., Traum, D., Gandhe, S., King, S., Lavis, S., Rocher, S., and Zbylut, M. (2006) AXL.Net: Web-enabled Case Method Instruction for Accelerating Tacit Knowledge Acquisition in Leaders. Proceedings of the 25th Army Science Conference, November 27-30, 2006, Orlando, FL. pdf

Gordon, A. (2006) Fourth Frame Forums: Interactive Comics for Collaborative Learning. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM 2006), October 23-27, Santa Barbara, CA. pdf

Gordon, A. and Swanson, R. (2006) Integrating logical inference into statistical text classification applications. Proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Integrating Logical Reasoning into Everyday Applications, Oct 13-15, 2006, Washington, DC. pdf

Gordon, A. (2006) Language evidence for changes in a Theory of Mind. In M. Arbib (ed) Action to Language via the Mirror Neuron System. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. info

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2006) A Comparison of Alternative Parse Tree Paths for Labeling Semantic Roles. Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING/ACL 2006). Sydney, Australia, July 17-21, 2006. pdf

Gandhe, S., Gordon, A., and Traum, D. (2006) Improving question-answering with linking dialogues. 2006 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Sydney, Australia, Jan 29 - Feb 1, 2006. pdf

2005

Gordon, A. (2005) The Fictionalization of Lessons Learned. Guest Editorial for Media Impact Column, IEEE Multimedia 12(4):12-14. pdf

Gordon, A. and Ganesan, K. (2005) Automated Story Extraction From Conversational Speech. Third International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 05), October 2-5, Banff, Canada. pdf

Gordon, A. (2005) Commonsense Psychology and the Functional Requirements of Cognitive Models. Proceedings of the 2005 AAAI Workshop on Modular Construction of Human-like Intelligence, July 10, 2005, Pittsburgh, PA. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. pdf

Hobbs, J. and Gordon, A. (2005) Encoding Knowledge of Commonsense Psychology. 7th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning. May 22-24, 2005, Corfu, Greece. pdf

Hobbs, J. and Gordon, A. (2005) Toward a Large-Scale Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology for Metacognition. 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium on Metacognitive Computing. March 21-23, Stanford, CA. pdf

Swanson, R. and Gordon, A. (2005) Automated Commonsense Reasoning About Human Memory. 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium on Metacognitive Computing. March 21-23, Stanford, CA. pdf

2004

Gordon, A. and Hobbs, J. (2004) Formalizations of Commonsense Psychology. AI Magazine 25(4):49-62. pdf

Hill, R., Gordon, A., and Kim, J. (2004) Learning the lessons of leadership experience: Tools for interactive case method analysis. Proceedings of the 24th Army Science Conference, Orlando Florida. pdf

Gandhe, S., Gordon, A., Leuski, A., Traum, D., and Oard, D. (2004) First steps toward linking dialogues: Mediating between free-text questions and pre-recorded video answers. Proceedings of the 24th Army Science Conference, Orlando Florida. pdf

Iuppa, N., Weltman, G. and Gordon, A. (2004) Bringing Hollywood Storytelling Techniques to Branching Storylines for Training Applications, Proceedings of the Third International Conference for Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments. August 10-13, 2004. Edinburgh, Scotland. pdf

Gordon, A. and Nair, A. (2004) Expressions Related to Knowledge and Belief in Children's Speech. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-2004), August 5-7, Chicago. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pdf

Gordon, A., van Lent, M., van Velsen, M., Carpenter, M., and Jhala, A. (2004) Branching Storylines in Virtual Reality Environments for Leadership Development. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-04), July 25-29, San Jose, CA. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. pdf

Gordon, A. (2004) Authoring Branching Storylines for Training Applications. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS-04). Santa Monica, CA, June 22-26. pdf

Gordon, A. (2004) Tough Love Between Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment (Invited talk). Proceedings of IE2004: Australian Workshop on Interactive Entertainment, Feb 13, 2004, University of Technology, Sydney. pdf

Gordon, A. (2004) The Representation of Planning Strategies. Artificial Intelligence 153:287-305. Journal homepage pdf

Gordon, A. (2004) Strategy Representation: An Analysis of Planning Knowledge. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. info

2003

Gordon, A. and Nair, A. (2003) Literary Evidence for the Cultural Development of a Theory of Mind. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-2003). July 31-Aug 2, Boston, MA. pdf

Gordon, A., Kazemzadeh, A., Nair, A., and Petrova, M. (2003) Recognizing Expressions of Commonsense Psychology in English Text. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2003) Sapporo, Japan, July 7-12, 2003. pdf

Hill, R., Douglas, J., Gordon, A., Pighin, F., and van Velsen, M. (2003) Guided Conversations about Leadership: Mentoring with Movies and Interactive Characters. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-03) August 12-14, 2003, Acapulco, Mexico. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. pdf

Gordon, A. and Hobbs, J. (2003) Coverage and Competency in Formal Theories: A Commonsense Theory of Memory. Proceedings of the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, Stanford University, March 24-26, 2003. pdf

Gordon, A. and Iuppa, N. (2003) Experience Management Using Storyline Adaptation Strategies. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Technologies for Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Darmstadt, Germany, March 24-26, 2003. pdf

2002

Gordon, A. (2002) The Theory of Mind in Strategy Representations. Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci-2002), George Mason University, Aug 7-10. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pdf

Gordon, A. (2002) Enabling and recognizing strategic play in strategy games: Lessons from Sun Tzu. The 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, Stanford University, March 25-27, 2002. pdf

Gordon, A. and Van Lent, M. (2002) Virtual Humans as Participants vs. Virtual Humans as Actors. The 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, Stanford University, March 25-27, 2002. pdf

2001

Gordon, A. (2001) Browsing Image Collections with Representations of Commonsense Activities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(11):925-929. pdf

Gordon, A. (2001) Strategies in Analogous Planning Cases. In J. Moore & K. Stenning (eds.) Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of Edinburgh, August 1-4, 2001. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pdf

Gordon, A. (2001) The Representational Requirements of Strategic Planning. Fifth symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, New York University, May 20-22, 2001. pdf

Gordon, A. (2001) Playing Chess with Machiavelli: Improving Interactive Entertainment with Explicit Strategies. The 2001 AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, Stanford University, March 26-28, 2001. pdf

earlier...

Gordon, A. (2000) Using Annotated Video as an Information Retrieval Interface. 2000 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, New Orleans, LA, January 9-12, 2000. pdf

Gordon, A. (1999) The Design of Knowledge-rich Browsing Interfaces for Retrieval in Digital Libraries. Northwestern University Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science. pdf

Gordon, A. and Domeshek, E. (1998) Deja Vu: A Knowledge-Rich Interface for Retrieval in Digital Libraries. 1998 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, San Francisco, CA, January 6-9, 1998. pdf

Domeshek, E., Kedar, S., and Gordon, A. (1996) Interactive Information Retrieval Systems with Minimalist Representation AAAI-96: Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Portland, OR. pdf

Gordon, A., Kedar, S., and Domeshek, E. (1996) Interfaces for Managing Access to a Video Archive. CHI-96: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, BC. pdf

Gordon, A., and Domeshek, E. (1995) Retrieval Interfaces for Video Databases. In Burke, R. (chair) AI Applications in Knowledge Navigation and Retrieval, Working notes of the AAAI-95 Fall Symposium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, November 10-12, 1995. pdf

Domeshek, E., and Gordon, A. (1995). Structuring Indexing for Video. In IMMI-95, First International Workshop on Intelligence and Multimodality in Multimedia Interfaces: Research and Applications. University of Edinburgh. pdf

Gordon, A. (1995) Automated Video Assessment of Human Performance In J. Greer (ed) Proceedings of AI-ED 95 - World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Washington, DC; August 16-19, 1995. Charlottesville, VA: AACE Press. pp. 541-546. pdf

Gordon, A., and Domeshek, E. (1995) Conceptual Indexing for Video Retrieval. In Maybury, M. (chair) Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval, Working notes of the IJCAI-95 Workshop, Montreal, Quebec, August 19, 1995. pdf