Appel: ECAI 2010 Workshop, Language, Pragmatics and Explanation, LPE ’10

Wed Apr 28 15:29:08 UTC 2010

Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:25:22 +0200 (CEST)
From: stdizier at irit.fr
Message-ID: <8e7d80efa478bed4cf69ad8c60741fed.squirrel at websecu.irit.fr>

Call for Papers: ECAI  2010 Workshop
Language, Pragmatics and Explanation, LPE’10
Lisbon, August 2010

Outline and aims

Explanation analysis and production is a wide topic that has been
addressed with specific objectives in disciplines such as didactics
and psychology, and in domains as diverse as law and legal reasoning,
politics and news editorials production, human resource management,
etc. Some forms of empirical analysis have emerged from these areas,
often under the form of schemas that characterize certain forms of
explanations and their expected role.

Some useful work has been carried out so far on formal aspects: mental
and conceptual models, semantics and pragmatics of explanation, but
less work on AI and related language technology (lexicon, grammar, and
semantics) aspects. Besides the need of formal developments,
computer-based explanation production is now becoming a crucial
component of a number of application areas, as, for example,
cooperative question-answering, involving language processing and
reasoning, where most responses provided by a system need to be paired
with explanations on how the response has been found and on how it
responds to the question. Lets us also cite computer-based didactic
systems where the transmission of a certain knowledge or know-how
needs to be paired with quite sophisticated forms of explanations. In
most contexts, these explanations must be generated dynamically: they
cannot be defined a priori via a few simple forms. On a more abstract
register, explanation analysis is crucial in a number of situations,
such as opinion analysis from news editorials or political speeches,
where the relevance and quality of the explanations will heavily
influence the opinions of listeners. Finally, procedures (maintenance,
social life, DIY, etc.) are a rich source for explanation analysis and
production.

Recent foundational, methodological and technological developments in
knowledge representation, in pragmatics (user models and profiling,
intentions modelling, etc.), in reasoning (e.g. argumentation,
decision theory, etc.), in advanced language processing, including
semantic and discourse analysis, and recent progress in Human Language
Technology, make it possible to foresee the elaboration of much more
accurate, cooperative and robust systems dedicated to explanation
analysis and production. These can be essentially language-based (via
online texts or web pages, operating either on open or closed domains)
or they can incorporate multimedia aspects. The user interface aspects
(input, output (e.g. SMS or advanced interfaces), on line help,
dialogue, etc.) are also crucial in the definition of such
systems. This leads us to also welcome contributions that involve
multi-media aspects.

The workshop addresses both empirical and formal models of
explanation. It includes, but is not limited to, the following topics:

Linguistic and conceptual aspects

- Rhetorical structures that support or contribute to explanation
  production and structure (elaborations, reformulations, examples,
  warnings, hints, various forms of arguments, etc.) and their
  structure and semantic and pragmatic role,

- Illocutionary force identification, persuasion effects,

- The language (lexical, grammatical) of explanation, language
  connectors, metaphors in explanation,

- Analysis of surface forms of explanation: textual, iconic,
  typography, graphics, images, multimodality,

- Characterization of explanation patterns (e.g. sequences of
  rhetorical structures) and their communicative role.,

- Specific problems, such as e.g. paraphrase and explanation,

- Cognitive aspects: perception of explanations by readers,
  implicature,

- Philosophical aspects and Ethics of explanation.  Annotation
  techniques and guidelines

- Guidelines for annotating explanation segments: what to annotate,
  and how,

- Annotator training aspects,

- Corpus development and validation: parameters to consider, various
  forms of corpora, tools for corpus collection, analysis and
  validation technologies.

Language processing aspects :

- Identification of explanation structures: by what means, lexical and
  grammar resources required, processing strategies,

- Resource and portability issues: the lexicon of explanation, domain
  related grammatical structures,

- Semantic representation, declarative and ‘operational’ semantics of
  connectors and rhetorical operators

- Specific linguistic aspects, such as: explanation and paraphrasing.
  Artificial intelligence aspects

- The logic of explanation,

- Models for explanations,

- Explanation-based systems, explanation in expert systems,

- Implicature, textual entailment, logic of assumptions and
  presuppositions,

- Related knowledge representation aspects, analysis of the required
  domain knowledge.

Explanation production, natural language generation issues

- Planning issues, e.g. w.r.t. explanation goals,

- Implementation of pragmatic aspects such as cooperativity,

- Lexical choice, sentence planning, taking into account of the user
  profile,

- Architecture of systems that support explanation generation
  Applicative domains, Man-Machine Communication, multimedia

- Analysis of explanation structures per domain, analysis of their
  role, their perception by users, specificities of certain domains
  and audiences

- Experiences from applications, e.g. as in: didactics (of science, of
  second language acquisition, etc., ); procedures and procedural
  knowledge; law; public debates, news and editorials; business;
  philosophy, etc.

- Explanation and its underlying effects: persuasion, emotions,

- Granularity of explanations, focusing, zooming in/out, user
  interactions and explanation management

- Multimedia aspects of explanation: e.g. pairing videos with textual
explanations.

Evaluation techniques and methods

- Identification of features to evaluate: technology aspects, user
  interaction and interpretation aspects, protocol definition and
  relevance measures,

- Engineering aspects: portability, re-usability, robustness,
  development costs and resources, interoperability, risk analysis,

- Explanation and economical models.

The workshop will be organized around a few major questions of
interest to a number of AI, NLP, linguistics, HLT, psychology and
pragmatics people.  Practitioners of explanation in various areas such
as didactics, opinion analysis, experimental psychology, ethics, are
encouraged to participate.  Application developers are also most
welcome.

Submission
The goal of this workshop is to enhance cross-discipline interactions.
Contributors must be opened to interactions with the different
workshop areas. The programme committee will care to have a balanced
number of participants from the different areas concerned.

Paper will go under peer review, as for most conferences.

To encourage an atmosphere appropriate for a workshop, we plan to:

    - have a 15mn discussion at the end of each session,

    - have a panel and an invited speaker, possibly plan a tentative
      roadmap definition,

    - plan demos on portable machines.

Submission format:

We welcome short papers (max 3 pages), describing projects or ongoing
research and long papers (max. 6 pages), that relate more established
results. Papers describing applications are encouraged, besides
theoretical contributions. Papers must be sent in .pdf format. The
format to use for papers and abstracts is the same as for ECAI. The
title page (no separate title page is needed) should include the
following information:

-	Title
-	Authors' names, affiliations, and email addresses
-	Topic(s) of the above list, as appropriate
-	Abstract (short summary up to 5 lines)

Papers must be sent to both co-organizers at the email addresses given
below.  Deadlines:

May 7th 2010: paper submission
June 7th: acceptance/rejection notification
June 25th: reception of final paper

All accepted papers (long and short) will be published in the workshop
proceedings.

Contact persons (co-chairs):
Leila Amgoud, Patrick Saint-Dizier   CNRS
IRIT  118 route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse cedex France.
Phone : +33 5 61 55 62 44/
amgoud, stdizier at irit.fr

Programme Committee
(more members to come)
Leila Amgoud, IRIT CNRS, France, (co-chair)
Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT-CNRS, France (co-chair)
Carlos Chenevar, Argentina,
Floriana Grasso, univ. of Liverpool, UK,
Claire Gardent, Loria, France,
Manfred Stede, Postdam, Germany,
K. Mouny, Univ. Mostaganem, Algeria,
Sivaji Bandhopadhyay, Jadavpur univ., Kolkata, India,
Asanee Kawtrakul, Kasetsart Univ., Bangkok, Thailand,
Sien Moens, KUL, Leuwen, Belgium,
Silvia Quarteroni, DISI, Trento, Italy,

Note: all workshop participants are expected to register to the
workshop and to the main conference.
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