Connectionists: [CFP] Third Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (SpLU) @EMNLP-2020

Tue Jul 28 17:36:54 EDT 2020

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CALL FOR PAPERS
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Third Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (SpLU) @EMNLP-2020 [https://spatial-language.github.io]

Submission Deadline: August 15th, 2020
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AIM AND SCOPE
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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.
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TOPICS OF INTEREST
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The topics include but not limited to:

-Spatial meaning representations, ontologies, annotation schemes, linguistic corpora
-Spatial information extraction from natural language
-Spatial information extraction in robotics, navigational instructions
-Text mining for spatial information in GIS systems
-Quantitative and qualitative reasoning with spatial information
-Spatial question answering
-Extraction of spatial common sense knowledge
-Visualization of spatial language in 2-D and 3-D (Combining spatial language & vision)
-Spatial natural language generation
-Grounded spatial language and dialogue systems

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IMPORTANT DATES
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Important Dates
• Submission Deadline: August 15th, 2020
• Notification: September 29th, 2020
• Camera Ready deadline: Oct 10, 2020
• Workshop Day: November 19/20, 2020
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INVITED SPEAKERS
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James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University
Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Yoav Artzi, Cornell University
Douwe Kiela, Facebook
Bonnie Dorr, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
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SUBMISSION AND SELECTION PROCESS
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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 (https://2020.emnlp.org/files/emnlp2020-templates.zip)]. Please make submissions via Softconf [Here (https://www.softconf.com/emnlp2020/spatial-language/)].
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.

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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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Parisa Kordjamshidi, Michigan State University
Archna Bhatia, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
Malihe Alikhani, University of Pittsburgh
Jason Baldrige, Google
Mohit Bansal, UNC Chapel Hill
Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven


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CURRENT PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Steven Bethard, The University of Arizona
Raffaella Bernardi, University of Trento
Mehul Bhatt, Örebro University - CoDesign Lab
Yonatan Bisk, Carniege Mellon University
Johan Bos, University of Groningen
Asli Celikyilmaz Microsoft Research
Joyce Chai, University of Michigan
Angel Xuan Chang, Simon Fraser University
Anthony Cohn, University of Leeds
Guillem Collell, KU Leuven
Simon Dobnik, University of Gothenburg
Bonnie Dorr, IHMC
Ekaterina Egorova, University of Zurich
Zoe Falomir, Universitat Bremen
Francis Ferraro, University of Maryland Baltimore
Lucian Galescu, IHMC
Lei Li, Bytedance
Julia Hockenmaier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Bruno Martins, University of Lisbon
Srini Narayanan, Google Inc.
Mari Broman Olsen, Lionbridge AI
Martijn van Otterlo, Tilburg University
Kirk Roberts, UT Health
Manolis Savva, Stanford University
Jesse Thomason, University of Washington
Clare Voss, ARL

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CONTACT
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Feel free to contact Organizing Committee at splu-2020 at googlegroups.com<mailto:splu-2020 at googlegroups.com>.
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Kordjamshidi, Parisa
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~kordjams/


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Kordjamshidi, Parisa
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University
http://www.cse.msu.edu/~kordjams/

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