27.73, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, Semantics, Text/Corpus Ling/UK

Tue Jan 5 16:30:18 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-73. Tue Jan 05 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.73, Calls: Cog Sci, Computational Ling, Semantics, Text/Corpus Ling/UK

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Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2016 11:30:12
From: Dimitrios Kartsaklis [d.kartsaklis at qmul.ac.uk]
Subject: Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Linguistics

Full Title: Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics and Linguistics 
Short Title: SLPCS 2016 

Date: 11-Jun-2016 - 11-Jun-2016
Location: Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Dimitrios Kartsaklis
Meeting Email: d.kartsaklis at qmul.ac.uk
Web Site: https://www.sites.google.com/site/semspworkshop 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Semantics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 20-Mar-2016 

Meeting Description:

Since their introduction in the early 1970s, vector space models of  meaning have evolved into a well-established area of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Their probabilistic nature and ability to exploit the abundance of large-scale resources such as the Web make them one of the most useful tools (arguably the most successful (Turney and Pantel, 2010)) for modeling what we broadly call meaning in language.  The geometry provided by the angular distance between the vectors has been widely used as a representative of the degree of similarity of meaning in NLP. 

Another field in which vector space models play an important role is physics, and especially quantum theory. Though seemingly unrelated to language, intriguing connections have recently been uncovered. Some examples include models of compositionality in distributional semantics (Coecke et al. 2010), treatments of logical words in vector space models (Widdows, 2003), reasoning about the human mental lexicon in cognitive processes (Bruza et al., 2009), using vectors of queries and documents in information retrieval (Van Rijsbergen, 2004), and representing the meaning of words by density operators (Piedeleu et al., 2015). There is also a long-standing history of vector space models in cognitive science. Theories of categorization such as those developed by Nosofsky (1986);   Smith, Osherson, Rips, & Keane, (1988), utilise notions of distance between concepts represented as feature vectors. More recently Gärdenfors (2004) has developed a model of concepts in which conceptual spaces prov
 ide geometric structures, and information is represented by points, vectors and regions in vector spaces. 

Exploiting the common ground provided by the concept of a vector space, the workshop aims to bring together researchers working at the intersection of NLP, cognitive science, and physics, offering to them an appropriate forum for presenting their uniquely motivated work and ideas. The interplay between these three disciplines will foster theoretically motivated approaches to understanding how meanings of words interact with each other in sentences and discourse, how diagrammatic reasoning depicts and simplifies this interaction, how language models are determined by input from the world, and how word and sentence meanings interact logically.  

Topics of interest include (but are not restricted to): 

- Reasoning in semantic spaces 
- Applications of quantum logic in natural language processing 
- Compositionality in semantic spaces and conceptual spaces 
- Links between conceptual spaces and natural language processing 
- Modeling functional words such as prepositions and relative pronouns in compositional distributional models of meaning 
- Diagrammatic reasoning for natural language processing

Invited Speakers: 

- Hans Briegel, University of Innsbruck 
- Peter Gärdenfors, University of Lund 
- Dominic Widdows, Microsoft (To be confirmed) 

Registration: 

Registration will open closer to the date of the workshop. Please check the website for more details. 

Organization: 

- Dimitrios Kartsaklis, Queen Mary University of London 
- Martha Lewis, University of Oxford 
- Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge 

Advisory Committee: 

- Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge 
- Bob Coecke, University of Oxford 
- Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London

Call for Papers:

Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP,  Physics and Cognitive Science 
11 June 2016, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland 
(co-located with QPL 2016) 

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/semspworkshop 
General enquiries: slpcs2016 at easychair.org 

Submission:

We solicit papers that describe original work. The submitted papers may consist of up to 6 pages of content (including references) in the EPTCS format (http://style.eptcs.org/). Authors are invited to submit their papers via EasyChair: 

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slpcs2016 

A selection of the accepted papers will be presented orally, and the rest of them as posters. Depending on participation and quality of submissions, 
the proceedings of the workshop will be published as an EPTCS (Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science) volume. 

Important Dates:
All deadlines are at 23:59 Howland Island time (UTC-12). 

- Paper submission deadline: 20 March 2016 
- Reviewing period: 27 March 2016-17 April 2016 
- Author notification: 24 April 2016 
- Workshop: 11 June 2016 

Programme Committee

- Peter Bruza, Queensland University of Technology 
- Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge 
- Bob Coecke, University of Oxford 
- Liane Gabora, University of British Columbia 
- Chris Heunen, University of Edinburgh 
- Peter Hines, University of York 
- Aleksandra Kislak-Malinowska, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn 
- Daniel Marsden, University of Oxford 
- Glyn Morrill, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya 
- Valeria de Paiva, Nuance Communications, Inc 
- Stanley Peters, University of Stanford 
- Stephen Pulman, University of Oxford 
- Matthew Purver, Queen Mary University of London 
- Sebastian Riedel, University College London 
- Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London 
- Frank Zenker, University of Konstanz

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