CFP: Computational Models of Narrative

[Mark Finlayson]

Please feel free to forward to all interested parties.


Call for Participation:
-----------------------

AAAI 2010 Fall Symposium on
=================================
Computational Models of Narrative
=================================
November 11-13, 2010, Arlington, Virginia

-----------------------------------------
Submissions Due:     Friday, May 14, 2010
-----------------------------------------

Narratives are ubiquitous.  We use them to educate, communicate, 
convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society has 
narratives, which suggests they are deeply rooted and serve an important 
cognitive function: that narratives do something for us.  It is clear 
that, to fully explain human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we 
will have to understand and explain narrative.

Topics
------
Despite a revival of interest in the computational understanding of 
narrative, there is still great uncertainty regarding fundamental 
questions.  What does narrative do for us?  What exactly is narrative? 
What representations are required to model narrative?  This symposium 
will address fundamental topics and questions regarding the 
computational modeling and scientific understanding of narrative. 
Immediate technological applications, while not discouraged, are not 
required. Questions include:

* What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts?  What 
is special about the discourse that makes something a narrative, rather 
than something else?

* What is the relationship between narrative and common sense?  Does 
understanding narrative first require we understand common sense reasoning?

* How are narratives indexed and retrieved?  Is there a "universal" 
scheme for encoding narratives?

* What impact does the purpose, function, and genre of a narrative have 
on its form and content?

* Are there systematic differences in the formal properties of 
narratives from different cultures?

* What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs?  Is there such a 
set?  Is there a recipe for generating narratives?

* What are the appropriate representations for the computational 
modeling of narrative?  What representations underlie the extraction of 
narrative schemas from experience?

* How can we evaluate computational models of narrative?

The symposium will bring together researchers with a wide variety of 
perspectives to share what is known about the fundamentals of the 
computational modeling of narrative and to explore the forefront of that 
knowledge.  We seek participation from as wide a variety of approaches 
as possible, including not only AI researchers and technologists, but 
also psychologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, philosophers, 
narrative theorists, anthropologists, educators, storytellers, and 
neuroscientists.

Submissions
-----------
Interested parties should send either a full paper (8 pages maximum) or 
a position paper (2 pages maximum) as a AAAI-formatted PDF to 
narrative-fs10 at csail.mit.edu. Accepted papers will be published in the 
proceedings of the symposium, which will be released as a AAAI Symposium 
technical report. For detailed formatting instructions, see the AAAI 
website http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php

Organizing Committee
--------------------
* Mark Finlayson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL)
* Pablo Gervas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
* Erik Mueller (IBM)
* Srini Narayanan (ICSI and University of California at Berkeley)
* Patrick Winston (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL)

For More Information
--------------------
Web: http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/fs10
Email: narrative-fs10 at csail.mit.edu