2nd CFP: Computational Models of Narrative

[Mark Finlayson]

Second Call for Papers
----------------------

2012 Workshop on
=================================
Computational Models of Narrative
=================================

May 26-27, 2012 (1.5 days)
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre
Istanbul, Turkey

http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/ws12/

to be co-located with the
2012 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC'2012)

(note: workshop dates have changed slightly since the first call)

Paper submission deadline: **February 24, 2012**

Invited Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jan Christoph Meister, Universität Hamburg

**Note:** There will be a number of travel grants available to authors 
who have papers at the workshop, but would otherwise be unable to attend 
because of financial constraints.


Workshop Aims
=============
Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to 
communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every 
society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in 
our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming 
increasingly clear that, to truly understand and explain human 
intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why 
narrative is universal and explain (or explain away) the function it 
serves. The aim of this workshop series is to address key, fundamental 
questions about narrative, using computational techniques, so to advance 
our understanding of cognition, culture, and society.

Special Focus: Shared Resources
===============================
In addition to fundamental questions, the field has yet to address key 
needs with regard to shared resources and corpora that could smooth and 
hasten the way forward. The vast majority of work on narrative uses 
fewer than four stories to perform their experiments, and rarely re-uses 
narratives from previous studies. Because NLP technology cannot yet take 
us all the way to the highly-accurate formal representations of language 
semantics, this implies significant amounts of repeated work in 
annotation. The way forward could be catalyzed by carefully constructed 
shared resources.

This meeting will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing 
fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative. Moreover, the 
meeting will have a special focus on the identification, collection, and 
construction of shared resources and corpora that facilitate the 
computational modeling of narrative. Papers should focus on issues 
fundamental to computational modeling and scientific understanding, or 
issues related to building shared resources to advance the field. 
Discussing technological applications or motivations is not discouraged, 
but is not required.

Illustrative Topics and Questions
=================================
-What kinds of shared resources are required for the computational study 
of narrative?
-What content and modalities should be put in a “Story Bank”? What 
formal representations should be used?
-What shared resources are available, or how can already-extant 
resources be adapted to common needs?
-What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts? What is 
special that makes something a narrative?
-What are the details of the relationship between narrative and common 
sense?
-How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a "universal" scheme 
for encoding episodes?
-What impact do the purpose, function, and genre of a narrative have on 
its form and content?
-What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? 
How many possible story lines are there?
-Are there systematic differences in the formal properties of narratives 
from different cultures?
-What are appropriate representations for narrative? What 
representations underlie the extraction of narrative schemas?
-How should we evaluate computational models of narrative?

Important Dates
===============
-February 24, 2012 - Submissions due
-March 19, 2012 - Notification of acceptance
-April 4, 2012 - Camera-ready versions due
-May 26-27, 2012 - Workshop (1.5 days)


Submission Details
==================
Submissions should be made through the workshop's START paper submission 
website at https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/Narrative2012/. Papers may 
fall into one of three categories: long papers (8 page limit), short 
papers (4 page limit), or position papers (2 page limit). Papers should 
follow the LREC style as specified on the main LREC site.

Organizing Committee
====================
-Mark A. Finlayson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
-Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
-Deniz Yuret, Koc University, Turkey
-Floris Bex, University of Dundee, UK

Program Committee
=================
-Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia, Canada
-Andrew Gordon, Intitute for Creative Technologies, USA
-Benedikt Löwe, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
-Whitman Richards, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
-Bart Verheij, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
-Patrick Winston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
-R. Michael Young, North Carolina State University, USA

Additional Information
======================
In preparation is an arrangement with a noted international journal for 
a special issue featuring expanded versions of the best papers from the 
workshop.

Sponsors
========
-ONR Global
-Office of Naval Research
-Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Previous Meetings
=================
-2010 AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Models of Narrative
-2009 MIT Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative

=================
Mark A. Finlayson
Research Scientist, MIT CSAIL
32 Vassar St. Room 32-258, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
+1.617.253.0287 (office); +1.617.515.0708 (mobile); markaf at mit.edu
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