27.626, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, General Ling, Philosophy of Lang, Semantics/Italy

Tue Feb 2 19:31:45 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-626. Tue Feb 02 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.626, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, General Ling, Philosophy of Lang, Semantics/Italy

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Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2016 14:31:12
From: Carla Umbach [umbach at zas.gwz-berlin.de]
Subject: Referential Semantics One Step Further

Full Title: Referential Semantics One Step Further 
Short Title: RefSemPlus 

Date: 22-Aug-2016 - 26-Aug-2016
Location: Bolzano, Italy 
Contact Person: Carla Umbach
Meeting Email: RefSemPlus2016 at gmail.com
Web Site: http://esslli2016.unibz.it/?page_id=397 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; General Linguistics; Philosophy of Language; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 29-Feb-2016 

Meeting Description:

Referential semantics one step further: Incorporating insights from conceptual
and distributional approaches to meaning

Though referential approaches to semantics have proven very successful at
providing meaningful analyses for a wide range of natural language data, some
important phenomena, particularly involving the lexicon, have eluded
insightful treatment. Notions going beyond reference and truth have been
influencing referential semantics for years, but the interest in incorporating
results and ideas from conceptually-oriented semantics into referential
approaches is noticeably increasing, as seen in the recent series of workshops
devoted to the issue (see also e.g. Hamm et al. 2009, Carlson 2010). In
parallel, interest has also grown in bringing related insights from
cognitively-informed distributional models of meaning into formal semantics
(Lenci 2008, Copestake & Herbelot 2012, Baroni et al. 2014). 

The aim of this workshop is to promote a 3-way dialog among these approaches
in order to clarify natural points of contact and to generate specific
hypotheses about how to improve the explanatory capacity of referential models
in a principled and testable manner. We build from referential models given
the empirical evidence that reference (whether to real or imaginary objects)
is a fundamental part of linguistic communication. Crucially, however,
reference makes use of complex descriptive content. Cognitive/conceptual
approaches place greater emphasis precisely on the richness of descriptive
content and richer theories of descriptive content clearly lead to richer
accounts of compositional phenomena. On the other hand, cognitive models are
laborious to construct, difficult to implement/test, and face challenges in
grounding. Compositional distributional models can help with the analysis of
rich descriptive content but are not currently suited to dealing with
reference. We therefore consider the incorporation of insights from conceptual
and distributional models into referential approaches, rather than the
reverse, the most viable strategy.

INVITED SPEAKERS
Barbara Partee
Markus Kracht
Mark Steedman
Alessandro Lenci

ORGANIZERS
Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Carla Umbach (ZAS Berlin / University of Cologne)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Guillermo Del Pinal, Markus Kracht,  Alessandro Lenci, Emar Maier, Louise
McNally, Barbara Partee, Antje Rossdeutscher, Galit W. Sassoon, Martin
Schäfer, Stephanie Solt, Mark Steedman, Carla Umbach

Final Call for Papers:

EXTENDED Deadline: 29 Feb 2016

Topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

- Lexical content, including semantic decomposition and grammatically salient
semantic features
- Polysemy and “meaning extension” more generally
- Semantic composition of complex lexical content, including e.g.
co-composition
- Alternative models of the notion of kind as used in referential semantics
- Foundational issues
- Practical methodological and modeling issues

Submissions:

Since we want this workshop to promote extensive discussion in a still
underdeveloped area, and we want to encourage broad participation, we welcome
two kinds of submissions:

- Long (30 minute) papers, for which we solicit two-page (plus references)
abstracts in at most 12pt font.
- Short (10 minute) position statements or comments whose goal is to provoke
focused discussion, for which we solicit one-page abstracts (plus references)
in at most 12pt font.

For those who submit long papers: Please indicate whether you would also be
willing to give a position statement/comment as an alternative to a long
paper.

The abstract submission deadline is February 29, 2016. Submission is through
Easy Chair at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=refsemplus2016

Inquiries should be addressed to RefSemPlus2016 at gmail.com.

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