After years of working as a lead/AI developer in video games and then as an engineering manager at Yelp, I reassessed my career path so I could pursue my lifelong desire to create engaging interactive storytelling experiences. My research focuses on fundamental advances in NLP and creative use of language.

I am currently a postdoc at Cornell Information Science working with Qian Yang. I completed my PhD in CS advised by Mohit Iyyer at UMass Amherst.

Updates

Publications

• A Framework for Exploring Player Perceptions of LLM-Generated Dialogue within Commercial Video Games
  Nader Akoury, Qian Yang and Mohit Iyyer
  Findings of EMNLP 2023
  [website] [bibtex]

  @inproceedings{akoury-etal-2023-framework,
      title = "A Framework for Exploring Player Perceptions of LLM-Generated Dialogue within Commercial Video Games",
      author = "Akoury, Nader  and
              Yang, Qian  and
              Iyyer, Mohit",
      booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023",
      month = dec,
      year = "2023",
      address = "Singapore",
      publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
  }

• The Perils of Using Mechanical Turk to Evaluate Open-Ended Text Generation
  Marzena Karpinska, Nader Akoury, and Mohit Iyyer
  EMNLP 2021
  [bibtex]

  @inproceedings{karpinska-etal-2021-storium,
      title = "The Perils of Using Mechanical Turk to Evaluate Open-Ended Text Generation",
      author = "Karpinska, Marzena  and
        Akoury, Nader  and
        Iyyer, Mohit",
      booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
      month = nov,
      year = "2021",
      address = "Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
      publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
      url = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06835",
  }

• STORIUM: A Dataset and Evaluation Platform for Machine-in-the-Loop Story Generation
  Nader Akoury, Shufan Wang, Josh Whiting, Stephen Hood, Nanyun Peng and Mohit Iyyer
  EMNLP 2020
  [website] [bibtex]

  @inproceedings{akoury-etal-2020-storium,
      title = "{STORIUM}: {A} {D}ataset and {E}valuation {P}latform for {M}achine-in-the-{L}oop {S}tory {G}eneration",
      author = "Akoury, Nader  and
        Wang, Shufan  and
        Whiting, Josh  and
        Hood, Stephen  and
        Peng, Nanyun  and
        Iyyer, Mohit",
      booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
      month = nov,
      year = "2020",
      address = "Online",
      publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
      url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.emnlp-main.525",
      pages = "6470--6484",
  }

• Syntactically Supervised Transformers for Faster Neural Machine Translation
  Nader Akoury, Kalpesh Krishna, and Mohit Iyyer
  ACL 2019
  [code] [poster] [bibtex]

  @inproceedings{akoury-etal-2019-syntactically,
      title = "Syntactically Supervised Transformers for Faster Neural Machine Translation",
      author = "Akoury, Nader  and
        Krishna, Kalpesh  and
        Iyyer, Mohit",
      booktitle = "Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
      month = jul,
      year = "2019",
      address = "Florence, Italy",
      publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
      url = "https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P19-1122",
      doi = "10.18653/v1/P19-1122",
      pages = "1269--1281",
  }

Workshop Papers

• Hybrid Dialogue Management for Task-Oriented Dialogue in Video Games
  Nader Akoury and Mohit Iyyer
  Wordplay: When Language Meets Games ACL 2024
  
• Towards Grounded Dialogue Generation in Video Game Environments
  Nader Akoury, Ronan Salz, and Mohit Iyyer
  Creative AI Across Modalities Workshop AAAI 2023