Connectionists: [CFP] Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (SpLU) & Grounded Communication for Robotics (RoboNLP) @NAACL-HLT 2019

Kordjamshidi, Parisa pkordjam at tulane.edu
Tue Jan 8 15:10:47 EST 2019


CALL FOR PAPERS
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Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (SpLU) & Grounded Communication for Robotics (RoboNLP)
NAACL-HLT 2019, June 6 or 7, Minneapolis,  USA.

Website: https://splu-robonlp.github.io<https://splu-robonlp.github.io/>

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AIM AND SCOPE
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SpLU-RoboNLP 2019 is a combined workshop on spatial language understanding (SpLU) and grounded communication for robotics (RoboNLP) that focuses on spatial language, both linguistic and theoretical aspects, and its application to various areas including and especially focusing on robotics. The combined workshop aims to bring together members of NLP, robotics, vision, and related communities in order to initiate discussions across fields dealing with spatial language along with other modalities. The desired outcome is identification of both shared and unique challenges, problems and future directions across the fields and various application domains.

While language can encode highly complex, relational structures of objects, spatial relations between them, and patterns of motion through space, the community has only scratched the surface on how to encode and reason about spatial semantics. Despite this, spatial language is crucial to robotics, navigation, NLU, translation and more. Standardizing tasks is challenging as we lack formal domain independent meaning representations. Spatial semantics requires an interplay between language, perception and (often) interaction.

Following the exciting recent progress in visual language grounding, the embodied, task-oriented aspect of language grounding is an important and timely research direction. To realize the long-term goal of robots that we can converse with in our homes, offices, hospitals, and warehouses, it is essential that we develop new techniques for linking language to action in the real world, where spatial language understanding is essential. Can we give instructions to robotic agents to assist with navigation and manipulation tasks in remote settings? Can we talk to robots about the surrounding visual world, and help them interactively learn the language needed to finish a task? We hope to learn about (and begin to answer) these questions as we delve deeper into spatial language understanding and grounding language for robotics.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST

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The major topics covered in the workshop include:

  1.  Spatial Language Meaning Representation (Continuous, Symbolic)

  2.
Spatial Language Learning and Reasoning
  3.
Multimodal Spatial Understanding
  4.
Instruction Following (real or simulated)
  5.
Grounded or Embodied tasks
  6.
Datasets and evaluation metrics

For a full description and subtopics, please look at the workshop website at
https://splu-robonlp.github.io/
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IMPORTANT DATES
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  *
Submission Deadline: March 6th, 2019
  *
Notification: March 27th, 2019
  *
Camera Ready deadline: April 5th, 2019
  *   Workshop Day: June 6th or 7th, 2019

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SUBMISSION AND SELECTION PROCESS

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Submission details
We encourage contributions with technical papers (NAACL style, 8 pages without references) or position statements (NAACL style, 4 pages maximum) describing previously unpublished work. NAACL Style files are available here<https://naacl2019.org/calls/papers>. Please make submissions via Softconf here<https://www.softconf.com/naacl2019/splu>.
Best Papers
The SpLU-RoboNLP 2019 expert program committee will select the best paper for an award.

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INVITED SPEAKERS
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  *
Joyce Chai<http://www.cse.msu.edu/~jchai/>, Michigan State University (confirmed)

  *
Dhruv Batra<https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~dbatra/>, GaTech/FAIR (to be confirmed)
  *
Mary Ellen Foster<http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~mefoster/>, Glasgow University (to be confirmed)
  *
Dilek Hakkani-Tur<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=GMcL_9kAAAAJ&hl=en&authuser=1&oi=ao>, Amazon (to be confirmed)
  *
Cynthia Matuszek<https://www.csee.umbc.edu/~cmat/>, UMBC (to be confirmed)
  *
Raymond J. Mooney<https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mooney/>, UT Austin (to be confirmed)
  *
Matthias Scheutz<https://engineering.tufts.edu/people/faculty/matthias-scheutz>, Tufts (to be confirmed)
  *
Stefanie Tellex<https://cs.brown.edu/~stefie10/>, Brown (to be confirmed)
  *
Andrea Thomaz<https://robo-nlp.github.io/www.ece.utexas.edu/people/faculty/andrea-thomaz>, UT Austin (to be confirmed)
  *   David Traum<http://people.ict.usc.edu/~traum/>, USC (to be confirmed)

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PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Yoav Artzi

Cornell University

Jacob Arkin

Univ of Rochester

Jason Baldridge

Google Inc. Mountain View CA

John A. Bateman

Universität Bremen

Mehul Bhatt

Örebro University

Jonathan Berant

Tel-Aviv University

Raffaella Bernardi

University of Trento

Steven Bethard

University of Arizona

Yonatan Bisk

University of Washington

Johan Bos

University of Groningen

Kalesha Bullard

Georgia Tech

Volkan Cirik

CMU

Guillem Collell

KU Leuven

Joyce Chai

Michigan State University

Simon Dobnik

CLASP and FLOV, University of Gothenburg

Ekaterina Egorova

University of Zurich

Zoe Falomir

Universität Bremen

Daniel Fried

UCSF

Lucian Galescu

IHMC

Felix Gervits

Tufts

Hannaneh Hajishirzi

University of Washington

Matthew Hausknecht

University of Texas

Julia Hockenmaier

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Casey Kennington

Boise State University

Jayant Krishnamurthy

Semantic Machines

Stephanie Lukin

Army Research Laboratory

Bruno Martins

University of Lisbon

Chris Mavrogiannis

Cornell

Hongyuan Mei

Johns Hopkins

Dipendra Misra

Cornell University

Ray Mooney

University of Texas

Srini Narayanan

Google Inc. Mountain View CA

Mari Broman Olsen

Microsoft

Martijn van Otterlo

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Aishwarya Padmakumar

UT Austin

Natalie Parde

University of Illinois Chicago

Ian Perera

IHMC

Preeti Ramaraj

University of Michigan

Siva Reddy

Stanford

Kirk Roberts

The University of Texas Health

Anna Rohrbach

UC Berkeley

Marcus Rohrbach

FAIR

Manolis Savva

Princeton University

Jivko Sinapov

Tufts

Kristin Stock

Massey University of New Zealand

Alane Suhr

Cornell

Clare Voss

ARL

Matt Walter

TTI-C

Tom Williams

University of Bristol

Mark Yatskar

Allen Institute

Shiqi Zhang

SUNY Binghamton

Victor Zhong


University of Washington

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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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James F. Allen<http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~james/>

University of Rochester<https://www.rochester.edu/>, IHMC<https://www.ihmc.us/>

jallen at ihmc.us<mailto:jallen at ihmc.us>

Jacob Andreas<https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jda/>

Semantic Machines/MIT<http://www.semanticmachines.com/>

jda at cs.berkeley.edu<mailto:jda at cs.berkeley.edu>

Jason Baldridge<http://www.jasonbaldridge.com/>

Google<https://www.google.com/>

jasonbaldridge at google.com<mailto:jasonbaldridge at google.com>

Mohit Bansal<http://www.cs.unc.edu/~mbansal/>

UNC Chapel Hill<https://www.unc.edu/>

mbansal at cs.unc.edu<mailto:mbansal at cs.unc.edu>

Archna Bhatia (Co-chair)<https://www.ihmc.us/groups/abhatia/>

IHMC<https://www.ihmc.us/>

abhatia at ihmc.us<mailto:abhatia at ihmc.us>

Yonatan Bisk<http://www.yonatanbisk.com/>

Univ of Washington<https://www.washington.edu/>

ybisk at yonatanbisk.com<mailto:ybisk at yonatanbisk.com>

Asli Celikyilmaz<https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/aslicel/>

Microsoft Research<https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/>

asli.ca at live.com<mailto:asli.ca at live.com>

Bonnie J. Dorr<https://www.ihmc.us/groups/bdorr/>

IHMC<https://www.ihmc.us/>

bdorr at ihmc.us<mailto:bdorr at ihmc.us>

Parisa Kordjamshidi<http://www.cs.tulane.edu/%7Epkordjam/> (Chair)

Tulane University<https://tulane.edu/>, IHMC<https://www.ihmc.us/>

pkordjam at tulane.edu<mailto:pkordjam at tulane.edu>

Matthew Marge<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=K931JfEAAAAJ&hl=en>

Army Research Lab<https://www.arl.army.mil/>

matthew.r.marge.civ at mail.mil<mailto:matthew.r.marge.civ at mail.mil>

Jesse Thomason<https://jessethomason.com/>

Univ of Washington<https://www.washington.edu/>

thomason.jesse at gmail.com<mailto:thomason.jesse at gmail.com>


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CONTACT
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Feel free to contact Organizing Committee at
splu-robonlp-2019 at googlegroups.com<mailto:splu-robonlp-2019 at googlegroups.com>


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Kordjamshidi, Parisa
Assistant Professor
CS Department at Tulane University
Research Scientist at IHMC<https://www.ihmc.us>
Homepage<http://www.cs.tulane.edu/~pkordjam/>



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