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<div class="">CALL FOR PAPERS</div>
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<div class="">Third Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (SpLU) @EMNLP-2020 [<a href="https://spatial-language.github.io" class="">https://spatial-language.github.io</a>]</div>
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<div class="" style="font-size: 13px;"><b class="">Submission Deadline: August 15th, 2020</b></div>
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<div class="">AIM AND SCOPE</div>
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<div class="">One of the essential functions of natural language is to express spatial relationships between objects. The workshop aims to advance research on how spatial information is processed, extracted, understood and used in natural languages. Spatial
language understanding is useful in many research areas and real-world applications including robotics, navigation, geographic information systems, traffic management, human-machine interaction, query answering and translation systems. Compared to other semantically
specialized linguistic tasks, standardizing tasks related to spatial language seem to be more challenging as it is harder to obtain an agreeable set of concepts and relationships and a formal spatial meaning representation that is domain independent and that
allows quantitative and qualitative reasoning. This has made research results on spatial language learning and reasoning diverse, task-specific and, to some extent, not comparable. Attempts to arrive at a common set of basic concepts and relationships as well
as making existing corpora inter-operable, however, can help avoid duplicated efforts within as well as across fields and instead focus on further developments in the respective fields for automatic learning and reasoning. Existing qualitative and quantitative
representation and reasoning models can be used for investigation of interoperability of machine learning and reasoning over spatial semantics. Research endeavors in this area could provide insights into many challenges of language understanding in general.
Spatial semantics is also very well-connected and relevant to visualization of natural language and grounding language into perception, central to dealing with configurations in the physical world and motivating a combination of vision and language for richer
spatial understanding. </div>
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<div class="">TOPICS OF INTEREST</div>
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<div class="">The topics include but not limited to:</div>
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<div class="">-Spatial meaning representations, ontologies, annotation schemes, linguistic corpora </div>
<div class="">-Spatial information extraction from natural language </div>
<div class="">-Spatial information extraction in robotics, navigational instructions </div>
<div class="">-Text mining for spatial information in GIS systems</div>
<div class="">-Quantitative and qualitative reasoning with spatial information </div>
<div class="">-Spatial question answering</div>
<div class="">-Extraction of spatial common sense knowledge </div>
<div class="">-Visualization of spatial language in 2-D and 3-D (Combining spatial language & vision)</div>
<div class="">-Spatial natural language generation </div>
<div class="">-Grounded spatial language and dialogue systems</div>
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<div class="">IMPORTANT DATES</div>
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<div class="">Important Dates</div>
<div class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"></span>•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;">
</span>Submission Deadline: August 15th, 2020</div>
<div class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"></span>•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;">
</span>Notification: September 29th, 2020</div>
<div class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"></span>•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;">
</span>Camera Ready deadline: Oct 10, 2020</div>
<div class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"></span>•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;">
</span>Workshop Day: November 19/20, 2020</div>
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<div class="">INVITED SPEAKERS</div>
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<div class="">James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University</div>
<div class="">Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign</div>
<div class="">Yoav Artzi, Cornell University</div>
<div class="">Douwe Kiela, Facebook</div>
<div class="">Bonnie Dorr, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition</div>
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<div class="">SUBMISSION AND SELECTION PROCESS</div>
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<div class="">We encourage contributions with technical papers (EMNLP style, 8 pages without references) or shorter papers on position statements describing previously unpublished work or demos (EMNLP style, 4 pages maximum). EMNLP Style files are available
[Here (<a href="https://2020.emnlp.org/files/emnlp2020-templates.zip" class="">https://2020.emnlp.org/files/emnlp2020-templates.zip</a>)]. Please make submissions via Softconf [Here (<a href="https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2020/spatial-language/" class="">https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2020/spatial-language/</a>)].</div>
<div class="">Non-Archival option: EMNLP workshops are traditionally archival. To allow dual submission of work to SpLU and other conferences/journals, we are also including a non-archival track. Space permitting, these submissions will still participate and
present their work in the workshop, will be hosted on the workshop website, but will not be included in the official proceedings. Please submit through softconf but indicate that this is a cross submission at the bottom of the submission form.</div>
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<div class="">ORGANIZING COMMITTEE</div>
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<div class="">Parisa Kordjamshidi, Michigan State University</div>
<div class="">Archna Bhatia, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition</div>
<div class="">Malihe Alikhani, University of Pittsburgh</div>
<div class="">Jason Baldrige, Google</div>
<div class="">Mohit Bansal, UNC Chapel Hill</div>
<div class="">Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven</div>
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<div class="">CURRENT PROGRAM COMMITTEE</div>
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<div class="">Steven Bethard, The University of Arizona</div>
<div class="">Raffaella Bernardi, University of Trento</div>
<div class="">Mehul Bhatt, Örebro University - CoDesign Lab</div>
<div class="">Yonatan Bisk, Carniege Mellon University</div>
<div class="">Johan Bos, University of Groningen</div>
<div class="">Asli Celikyilmaz Microsoft Research</div>
<div class="">Joyce Chai, University of Michigan</div>
<div class="">Angel Xuan Chang, Simon Fraser University</div>
<div class="">Anthony Cohn, University of Leeds</div>
<div class="">Guillem Collell, KU Leuven</div>
<div class="">Simon Dobnik, University of Gothenburg</div>
<div class="">Bonnie Dorr, IHMC</div>
<div class="">Ekaterina Egorova, University of Zurich</div>
<div class="">Zoe Falomir, Universitat Bremen</div>
<div class="">Francis Ferraro, University of Maryland Baltimore</div>
<div class="">Lucian Galescu, IHMC</div>
<div class="">Lei Li, Bytedance</div>
<div class="">Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign</div>
<div class="">Bruno Martins, University of Lisbon</div>
<div class="">Srini Narayanan, Google Inc.</div>
<div class="">Mari Broman Olsen, Lionbridge AI</div>
<div class="">Martijn van Otterlo, Tilburg University</div>
<div class="">Kirk Roberts, UT Health</div>
<div class="">Manolis Savva, Stanford University</div>
<div class="">Jesse Thomason, University of Washington</div>
<div class="">Clare Voss, ARL</div>
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<div class="">CONTACT</div>
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<div class="">Feel free to contact Organizing Committee at <a href="mailto:splu-2020@googlegroups.com" class="">splu-2020@googlegroups.com</a>.</div>
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<div class="">Kordjamshidi, Parisa</div>
<div class="">Assistant Professor </div>
<div class="">Computer Science and Engineering</div>
<div class="">Michigan State University</div>
<div class=""><a href="http://www.cse.msu.edu/~kordjams/" class="">http://www.cse.msu.edu/~kordjams/</a></div>
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Kordjamshidi, Parisa<br class="">
Assistant Professor <br class="">
Computer Science and Engineering<br class="">
Michigan State University<br class="">
<a href="http://www.cse.msu.edu/~kordjams/" class="">http://www.cse.msu.edu/~kordjams/</a></div>
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