Call for Participation

The problem of sharing meaning is becoming an increasingly important issue for computational systems, as more and more of these systems are expected to interact with each other and with human users without prior agreement on the semantics of communication, to process and connect unstructured and heterogeneous data generated by different sources, and to coordinate their activities in environments that involve multiple views and objectives. The ESSENCE network studies this problem from an interdisciplinary point of view, bringing together researchers and practitioners from computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural language processing, linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together students and top researchers from all these (and other) communities to discuss key issues in this space, which have hitherto engaged in largely disconnected efforts to understand phenomena related to the emergence and evolution of shared semantics. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• ontology mapping, matching, and learning;
• symbol grounding and anchoring;
• dialogue systems, natural and artificial;
• semantic search, linked data analysis and curation;
• information retrieval, extraction, text processing;
• agent communication and coordination;
• rational models of communication, language games;
• human-robot and robot-robot interaction;
• game-theoretic models of communication and signalling;
• data and sensor fusion, distributed signal processing;
• natural language generation and understanding;
• models of language evolution, emergent semantics;
• automated data integration, machine translation;
• crowdsourced common-sense knowledge bases;
• social network analysis of communication and meaning;
• multilingual and cross-cultural semantic analysis;
• cognitive modelling of language acquisition and development;
• data-to-text generation.

The thematic scope of the workshop is intentionally broad in terms of considering contributions that address some aspect of modelling meaning and its evolution. However, we emphasise that, in line with the ‘Algorithms for Processing Meaning’ theme, submissions that focus on computational aspects of such phenomena will be considered preferentially.

Submission Guidelines

We invite extended abstracts (2-4 pages) and full papers (8 pages, excluding references) for presentation. Papers must be submitted as PDF following the IEEE format (https://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html) through the EasyChair workshop page at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essence2015. Submissions are not anonymous.

As the number of presentations at the workshop is limited, the peer review process will filter and rank submissions so that the highest-quality and most relevant ones get a full presentation slot. In consequence, some papers may be invited for poster presentation and/or short oral presentation. Papers that have been submitted or published elsewhere are welcome, as the primary purpose of the workshop is open discussion and exchange of ideas.

No formal proceedings are planned for the workshop, so that authors are able to publish their accepted papers in other venues. If we receive a sufficient number of high-quality, original publications, we will consider publishing post-proceedings by way of an edited volume or a special issue of an international journal. By submitting a paper authors agree for the final version of this paper to be published online after the workshop, and are responsible for ensuring that copyright agreements with other publishers are honoured in the case of previously published work.

We particularly encourage submissions from junior researchers and PhD students, and will provide extensive financial support to attend the event for a number of invited participants. The workshop will not charge a registration fee to invited attendees, and lunch and coffee breaks will be provided free of charge. For participants who wish to attend without presenting a paper, a modest workshop registration fee of EUR 150 will be charged to cover catering costs and print materials.

IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission deadline: May 5, 2015 (extended)
Author notification: May 8, 2015
Final versions: May 15, 2015
Workshop dates: May 20-22, 2015

Venue

The workshop will be held at the Residence for Researchers of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Barcelona (http://www.resa.es/eng/Residences/Investigadors) from Wednesday 20th to Friday 22nd May 2015.
The Residence also provides good quality budget accommodation in the heart of Barcelona, but participants are free to choose other options for accommodation. Barcelona is a vibrant, cosmopolitan city renowned for its history, culture, and nightlife and is easily accessible by air travel from all major international airports.

Organizing Committee

Kemo Adrian, IIIA-CSIC Barcelona
Gábor Bella, University of Trento (Chair)
Nico Bova, University of Edinburgh
Raquel Fernandez, ILLC Amsterdam
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento
Mercedes Huertas, University of Trento
Mladjan Jovanovic, University of Trento
Fiona McNeill, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh
Robert van Rooij, ILLC Amsterdam
Enric Plaza, IIIA-CSIC Barcelona
Michael Rovatsos, University of Edinburgh
Carlos Ruiz, Taiger, Madrid
Marco Schorlemmer, IIIA-CSIC Barcelona
Luc Steels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Remi van Trijp, SONY Research Labs Paris
Mila Vukomanovic, University of Edinburgh

Fellows papers presented at the workshop

• Huertas-Migueláñez, Mercedes, "Crowdsourcing for building and maintaining multilingual knowledge resources", 2015. (pdf)
• Vourliotakis, Aimilios, Rovatsos, Michael & Ruiz Moreno, Carlos, "Validation of entity relations in linked data", 2015. (pdf)
• Schlöder, Julian J., Alex Lascarides, "Interpreting English Pitch Contours in Context", Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2015, "goDial"), 2015. (pdf)
• Marques, Tânia, "Towards a taxonomy of task-oriented domains of dialogue", Proceeding of the 18th Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 2015), 2015. (pdf)
• Jovanovic, Mladjan, "Gamifying Knowledge Maintenance", 2015. (pdf)
• Brochhagen, Thomas, "Minimal Requirements for Productive Compositional Signaling", Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015), 2015. (pdf)
• Chocrón, Paula, Schorlemmer, Marco, "Social Coordination Systems with Ontology Heterogeneity", 2015. (pdf)
• Van Eecke, Paul, "Achieving Robustness through the Integration of Language Production in Comprehension", Proceedings of the EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science (EAP CogSci), 2015. (pdf)
• Bova, Nicola, Rovatsos, Michael, "Towards a Framework for Winograd Schemas Resolution", 2015. (pdf)
• Adrian, Kemo, "Argumentation and agreement over concept meaning in simple scenarios", 2015. (pdf)

Contact

For any queries related to the workshop, please contact [email protected].