(From left) SnuBiVtt members

On June 6, SnuBiVtt, a four-member research team under the guidance of Professor Zhang Byoung-Tak of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, won the Visual Storytelling Challenge. This competition was part of a workshop for computational linguistics, at the 2018 North American Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) in New Orleans.

While artificial intelligence has made great progress since its advent in the 1950s, storytelling is an obstacle that AI has yet to overcome. At the workshop, experts from around the world convened in efforts to advance the capability of AI in storytelling. In addition to the competition, the workshop also held talks by experts on subjects such as “The Role of AI in Human Storytelling,” “Telling Stories with Soundtracks,” and “An Encoder-Decoder Approach to Predicting Causal Relations in Stories.”

During the challenge, teams were required to create a program that could generate a written story based on five images. Professor Zhang’s team received the highest score in each of the six categories of evaluation. According to the professor, “the technology to automatically turn pictures into narrative will be useful for AI to better understand everyday life, such as in creating travelogues.”

Written by Yu Young Jin, SNU English Editor coin1234@snu.ac.kr
Reviewed by Professor Travis Lamar Smith, Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, tlsmith@snu.ac.kr