CFP: 5th Computational Models of Narrative Workshop (CMN'14)

[Mark Finlayson]

ANNOUNCEMENT

Fifth Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN'14)
July 31 - August 2, 2014
Quebec City Conference Center, Quebec City, Canada
http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/cmn14/

Important Dates:

April 11, 2014. Submission deadline.
May 9, 2014. Notification of acceptance.
May 30, 2014. Final versions due.
July 23-26, 2014. CogSci 2014.
July 27-31, 2014. AAAI-14.
July 26-31, 2014. CNS 2014.
July 31 - August 2, 2014. Workshop in Quebec City.

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 and to what extent narrative is universal and explain (or explain
away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop series is to
address key questions that advance our understanding of narrative at
multiple levels: from the psychological and cognitive impact of
narratives to our ability to model narrative responses
computationally.

Special Focus: Neuroscience

This inter-disciplinary workshop will be an appropriate venue for
papers addressing fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative.
The workshop will be held in association with the following meetings:

   - The 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
   - The 28th Conference on Artificial Intelligence
   - The 23rd Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting

The workshop will have a special focus on the neuroscience of
narrative. Papers should be relevant to issues fundamental to the
computational modeling and scientific understanding of narrative; we
especially welcome papers relevant to the neuroscientific and cognitive
aspects of narrative. Regardless of its focus, reported work should
provide some sort of insight of use to computational modeling of
narratives. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not
prohibited, but is not required. We accept both finished research and
more tentative exploratory work.

Illustrative Topics and Questions
    - What are the neural correlates of narrative or narrative
      processing?
    - How can we study narrative from a neuroscientific or cognitive
      point of view?
    - Can narrative be subsumed by current models of higher-level
      cognition, or does it require new approaches?
    - How do narratives mediate our cognitive experiences, or affect our
      cognitive abilities?
    - How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a universal
      scheme for encoding episodic information?
    - What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a
      set? How many possible story lines are there?
    - Is narrative structure universal, or are there systematic
      differences in narratives from different cultures?
    - 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?
    - What shared resources are required for the computational study of
      narrative? What should a “Story Bank” contain?
    - What shared resources are available, or how can already-extant
      resources be adapted to the study of narrative?
    - What are appropriate formal or computational representations for
      narrative?
    - How should we evaluate computational and formal models of
      narrative?

Organizers:
    - Mark A. Finlayson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A.)
    - Jan Christoph Meister (Universitaet Hamburg, Germany)
    - Emile Bruneau (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A.)