32.2504, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Neuroling, Pragmatics, Psycholing/Online

Wed Jul 28 18:32:14 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2504. Wed Jul 28 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2504, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Neuroling, Pragmatics, Psycholing/Online

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================================================================

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2021 14:31:40
From: Jennifer Hu [jennhu at mit.edu]
Subject: Meaning in Context Workshop @ NeurIPS 2021

Full Title: Meaning in Context Workshop @ NeurIPS 2021 
Short Title: MiC 

Date: 13-Dec-2021 - 14-Dec-2021
Location: Virtual, USA 
Contact Person: Jennifer Hu
Meeting Email: jennhu at mit.edu
Web Site: https://mic-workshop.github.io/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Neurolinguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 10-Sep-2021 

Meeting Description:

Pragmatics – the aspects of language use that involve reasoning about context
and other agents’ goals and belief states – has traditionally been treated as
the “wastebasket” of language research (Bar-Hillel 1971), posing a challenge
for both cognitive theories and artificial intelligence systems. Ideas from
theoretical linguistics have inspired computational applications, such as in
referential expression generation (Krahmer and van Deemter, 2012) or
computational models of dialogue and recognition of speech or dialogue acts
(Bunt and Black, 2000; Jurafsky, 2006; Ginzburg and Fernández, 2010; Bunt,
2016). But only recently, powerful artificial models based on neural or
subsymbolic architectures have come into focus that generate or interpret
language in pragmatically sophisticated and potentially open-ended ways
(Golland et al. 2010, Andreas and Klein 2016, Monroe et al. 2017, Fried et al.
2018), building upon simultaneous advances in the cognitive science of
pragmatics (Franke 2011, Frank and Goodman 2012). However, such models still
fall short of human pragmatic reasoning in several important aspects. For
example, existing approaches are often tailored to, or even trained to excel
on, a specific pragmatic task (e.g., Mao et al. (2016) on discriminatory
object description), leaving human-like task flexibility unaccounted for. It
also remains underexplored how pragmatics connects to domain-general
reasoning, how it may be efficiently implemented, and how it may arise over
the course of learning and evolution. 

In this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers from Cognitive Science,
Linguistics, and Machine Learning to think critically about the next
generation of artificial pragmatic agents and theories of human pragmatic
reasoning. This workshop will take place at the 2021 conference on Neural
Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

Call for Papers: 

We invite papers from Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Machine Learning
that explore synergies between pragmatics in humans and machines. In addition
to theoretical or empirical findings, we welcome “blue sky” reflections upon
open problems, prospects for future development, and positions on the current
state of the art.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- Successful or failed integrations of pragmatics into artificial agents
- Datasets, tasks, or evaluation metrics for measuring pragmatic reasoning
- Computational models of human pragmatic reasoning
- Applications of pragmatics in artificial agents in various domains
- Surveys or replication of existing work
- Proposals for longer-term research programs

Submission Instructions: 
Authors may choose between two submission formats: short paper or abstract.
Short papers are limited to 4 pages of content, with unlimited pages for
references and appendices. Abstracts are limited to 1 page of content, with
unlimited pages for references and appendices. We ask that authors use
appendices only for minor details that are not necessary for understanding the
paper. Submissions must be fully anonymized. The review process will be
double-blind.

All accepted papers will be presented in a virtual poster session and listed
on the website. A small number of accepted papers will be selected to be
presented as contributed talks. We particularly encourage submissions from
groups that are underrepresented at machine learning conferences based on
factors including gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race,
ethnicity, nationality, disability, and institution.

The paper template and style files can be found on our website. Do not use the
standard NeurIPS style files. Please refer to the NeurIPS 2021 formatting
instructions (also available on our website) for best practices regarding
style.

The submission link and details will be provided closer to the submission
deadline. 

Dual submission policy: 
We welcome papers that are currently under review, but discourage submission
of papers that will be presented at the main conference or have been
previously published at an ML conference. Accepted papers will be published on
the workshop homepage, but will not be part of the official proceedings and
are to be considered non-archival.

Important dates: 
Submission deadline: September 10, 2021
Author notification: October 22, 2021
Speaker videos due: November 8, 2021

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2504	
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