24.3913, Calls: Computational Ling, Pragmatics, Text/Corpus Ling, Psycholing, Socioling, Philosophy of Ling/UK

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-3913. Mon Oct 07 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.3913, Calls: Computational Ling, Pragmatics, Text/Corpus Ling, Psycholing, Socioling, Philosophy of Ling/UK

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Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 10:29:00
From: Geri Popova [g.popova at gold.ac.uk]
Subject: AISB Symposium on Questions, Discourse and Dialogue: 20 Years after Making it Explicit

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Full Title: AISB Symposium on Questions, Discourse and Dialogue: 20 Years after Making it Explicit 
Short Title: AISB50QDD 

Date: 01-Apr-2014 - 04-Apr-2014
Location: London, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Rodger Kibble
Meeting Email: aisb50qdd at open.ac.uk
Web Site: http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01rk/AISB50QDD.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 03-Jan-2014 

Meeting Description:

The Symposium on Questions, Discourse and Dialogue: 20 Years after Making it Explicit is part of the 50th anniversary convention of the society for the study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (the AISB). The convention will take place at Goldsmiths, University of London between April 1 and April 4, 2014.

Location:

Goldsmiths University of London
Lewisham Way
London SE14 6NW, UK

http://www.gold.ac.uk

Invited Speaker:

Professor Ruth Kempson FBA, Kings College London/QMUL

Call for Papers:

Symposium website: http://doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01rk/AISB50QDD.html
Convention website: http://www.aisb.org.uk/events/aisb14
Contact email for this symposium: aisb50qdd at open.ac.uk

Important Dates:

January 3, 2014: Deadline for submission of full papers
February 3, 2014: Notification to authors
February 24, 2014: Deadline for final camera-ready copy of full papers and copyright forms
April 1 – 4, 2014: AISB symposium at Goldsmiths

Scope of the Symposium:

The ability to engage in a dialogue has been trumpeted as a good indicator of general intelligent behaviour since Turing (1950). Philosophers such as Hamblin (1970), Brandom (1994) and Davidson (2001) can be said to have proposed various types of linguistic rationalism, the notion that linguistic abilities are a pre- or co-requisite for rationality: in Brandom's terms, the hallmark of rationality is the ability to take part in the game of 'giving and asking for reasons'. Indeed, Deligiorgi (2002) already finds in Kant the notion that 'rationality cannot be exercised by a solitary thinker' but depends on the communication of publicly criticisable judgments. The capacity to engage in a dialogue could very well be AI-complete, i.e., employ all the skills and abilities that constitute human-level intelligence.
 
The year 2014 marks several significant anniversaries: one of them is the 20th year since the publication of Brandom's Making it Explicit, a large, complex and difficult work in the philosophy of language which Jürgen Habermas likened to Rawls' Theory of Justice in terms of its scope and importance within its field. It is fair to say that this work has so far had little direct influence on computational or formal approaches to language, though some partial formalisations have been offered by Lance and Kremer, Kibble and Piwek. This symposium will be loosely organised around various themes arising from Brandom's work, or questions provoked by it, though participants will not necessarily be expected to directly engage with his original texts. As noted, Brandom sees the game of 'giving and asking for reasons' as central to human rationality or sapience, but it turns out that he has rather little to say about questions or any other speech acts apart from assertion. Brandom stresses the importance of shared 'material' inferences for successful communication, though it is far from clear how this common background understanding could be encoded in a computer system.
 
Topics of Interest:
 
Suitable subjects will include, but are not limited to:

- Inference in dialogue
- Commitments, norms, discourse obligations and dialogue games
- Intentionality: can discourse and dialogue be modelled without reference to mentalistic notions of intention and belief?
- Comparison of formalisms for discourse analysis: e.g. RST, SDRT
- Argumentation: analysis and representation of argument structure

Coherence:

- What is an appropriate response at a given point in a dialogue?
- What is the optimal ordering of propositions in a discourse?
- How should predicates, referring expressions and rhetorical relations be realised (verbally and/or non-verbally), so that the resulting utterance can be interpreted naturally and fluently?
- Annotation schemes for discourse relations

Questions and answers:

- Does an account of questions presuppose a model of assertion (or vice versa)?
- Cognitive and computational models of question generation (QG)
- Question taxonomies
- Data collection and preparation for developing, training, and testing QG systems
- Annotation schemes and processes
- Evaluation of generated questions: metrics and methods (human, automatic, semi-automatic)
 
Contributions will be welcome from all disciplines which include discourse and dialogue in their subject matter, including computational linguistics, corpus analysis, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, argumentation theory, legal reasoning, literary theory and so on.

Submission Details:

The symposium is expected to take up one full day, with up to 9 contributed papers and one invited talk of 30 minutes each including time for questions and discussion. There may also be a poster session, depending on the number and quality of submissions received. Submission will be by means of full papers, using an online conference management system (details to follow).
 
Submissions and final papers must be prepared in LaTeX or MS Word format, using templates which can be downloaded from http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb08/download.html. Final papers should be no more than 8 pages long (shorter papers are also welcome).
 
Accepted papers will be published in the general proceedings of the AISB Convention with an ISBN number, with the proviso that at least one author attends the symposium in order to present the paper and participate in general symposium activities. Authors of accepted papers will be required to complete a copyright form in advance of the convention. The main purpose of this form is to give AISB permission to publish your contribution as part of the printed and electronic proceedings, and there will be no further limitation of your rights in the material.
 
We intend to include a selection of high-quality submissions in a journal special issue.

Organising Committee:

Dr Rodger Kibble, Goldsmiths University of London
Dr Paul Piwek, The Open University
Dr Geri Popova, Goldsmiths University of London

Contact email: aisb50qdd at open.ac.uk

Programme Committee:

Robbert-Jan Beun, Utrecht University (Netherlands)
Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, North Carolina State University (US)
Harry Bunt, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
Marc Cavazza, Teesside University (UK)
Yasemin J Erden, St Mary's University College (UK)
Arash Eshghi, Heriot Watt University (UK)
Raquel Fernandez Rovira, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Jonathan Ginzburg, Université Paris-Diderot, Paris 7 (France)
Pat Healey, QMUL (UK)
Eric Kow, IRIT (France)
James Lester, North Carolina State University (US)
Rodney Nielsen, University of North Texas (US)
Brian Plüss, The Open University (UK)
Richard Power, The Open University (UK)
Rashmi Prasad, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (US)
Matthew Purver, QMUL (UK)
Hannes Rieser, University of Bielefeld (Germany)
Vasile Rus, University of Memphis (US)
Amanda Stent, Yahoo! Labs (US)
Matthew Stone, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US)
Svetlana Stoyanchev, Columbia University (US)
Allan Third, The Open University (UK)
Ken Turner, University of Brighton (UK)
Laure Vieu, IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier (France)
Xuchen Yao, Johns Hopkins University (US)







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