[ACT-R-users] Call For Participation, AAAI Fall Symposium 2007, Cognitive Approaches to NLP

[Ball, Jerry T Civ USAF AFRL/HEAT]

 Call for Participation:

 

AAAI Fall Symposium Series

November 8-11, 2007

Westin Arlington Gateway, Arlington, VA

 

Topic: Cognitive Approaches to NLP

 

We propose this symposium to highlight NLP research at the intersection
of AI/Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science/Computational
Psycholinguistics--especially research which integrates symbolic and
statistical/connectionist representations with serial and parallel
processing mechanisms into large-scale, functional,
cognitively-motivated (or better yet, cognitively plausible) NLP
systems.

 

Major topics of discussion are expected to include:

 

Cognitive/hybrid approaches to parsing and text meaning analysis

 

Cognitive/hybrid approaches to generation

 

Cognitive/hybrid approaches to knowledge representation (KR) and
reasoning

 

Cognitive/hybrid approaches to knowledge acquisition

 

Cognitively-motivated implementations of NLP and information extraction
(IE) systems

 

Applying cognitive architectures to build functional NLP systems

 

Evaluations, advantages and disadvantages of cognitively-motivated NLP
systems

 

This symposium will be of special interest to researchers interested in
building cognitively-motivated, large-scale, real-world NLP systems,
although researchers interested in building more specialized systems may
also want to participate. Researchers engaged in this interdisciplinary
area of research are consumers of experimental and theoretical research
in psycholinguistics and human language processing without necessarily
being psycholinguists or experimental psychologists. However, attempts
to build large-scale, cognitively motivated NLP systems are likely to
reveal weaknesses in cognitive theories of language representation and
processing which will provide important feedback to more experimentally
and theoretically oriented researchers. A key assumption underlying this
symposium is the idea that adhering to well-established cognitive
constraints on language processing may actually facilitate, rather than
hinder, the development of functional NLP systems. The adoption of such
cognitive constraints narrows the search space for possible solutions,
focusing attention in research directions that are more likely to lead
to feasible systems than the reliance on brute force computational
mechanisms like exhaustive search and algorithmic backtracking which are
both cognitively implausible and computationally intractable.

 

A major goal of this symposium is to identify issues which need to be
overcome in the development of large-scale, cognitively-motivated NLP
systems, and to highlight emerging techniques and solutions for
addressing these issues. 

 

Submissions

 

Prospective participants are invited to submit research (up to 8 pages)
or position (2 pages) papers, in PDF or Word format using AAAI
guidelines, to Jerry Ball (jerry.ball at mesa.afmc.af.mil) on or before May
1, 2007. All submissions will be reviewed by the program review
committee (TBD). Notifications of acceptance will be emailed on May 21,
2007. Accepted papers will be presented at the symposium and published
in the AAAI technical report series. Camera-ready copies are due to AAAI
on or before September 14, 2007.

 

Organizing Committee

 

Jerry Ball, Air Force Research Laboratory, Human Effectiveness
Directorate

Krishna Jha, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technologies Laboratories 

Sergei Nirenburg, University of Maryland Baltimore County 

Marjorie McShane, University of Maryland Baltimore County

 

 

For more information about the symposium see the supplementary symposium
web site (http://www.doublertheory.com/AAAIFallSymposium2007.htm)

 

 

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