Connectionists: Workshop: Machine Learning and the Evolution of Language at JCoLE 2022, Japan

[Bart de Boer]

# Machine Learning and the Evolution of Language: Workshop announcement 
+ CFP

We are pleased to announce the workshop "Machine Learning and the 
Evolution of Language: Building a bridge between communities", which 
will be held at the [Joint Conference on Language Evolution 
2022](https://sites.google.com/view/joint-conf-language-evolution/home) 
(Japan and online, September 5th - 8th, 2022). The workshop will take 
place on September 5th, 2022 over two sessions (morning and afternoon, 
Japan time).

The goal of this workshop is to build a bridge between the language 
evolution community and the machine learning community. The workshop 
will feature presentations from invited speakers and a lively panel 
discussion on the advantages and pitfalls of using emergent 
communication with deep learning models as well as more classic 
agent-based computational models. For more information on the schedule 
and the list of invited speakers, please visit: 
https://ml4evolang.github.io/

To futher expand this rich program, we invite the submission of 
abstracts to be presented as posters in the workshop.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
--------------------
In the past three decades, numerous studies have attempted to mimic the 
evolution of language with human participants and agent-based 
computational models. Meanwhile, in the last decade, the machine 
learning community has similarly made exciting strides in simulating 
emergent communication with deep and reinforcement learning methods.

Although both areas of research have similar interests and work on 
similar questions, there has been little crosstalk between them so far. 
This is unfortunate, since the progress in machine learning and other 
areas of AI may allow language evolution researchers to model phenomena 
that they could not model before. At the same time, theoretical and 
experimental knowledge of language evolution coming from the linguistics 
community may help focus models of emergent communication used by the 
machine learning community.

The goal of this workshop is therefore to relate these two areas by 
bringing together researchers from both backgrounds, establishing common 
ground, bootstrapping a mutual dialogue between them, and discussing the 
potential pitfalls of incorporating machine learning methods in the 
study of language evolution.

CALL FOR PAPERS
---------------
We welcome submissions of abstracts of **up to 300 words** on the basis 
of new, in-progress, or already published work whose content is relevant 
to the topics of the workshop, including but not limited to:

- Machine learning methods for understanding language evolution
- Emergent communication with reinforcement learning
- Agent-based modeling of language evolution

**Deadline for submission is June 25, 2022**. Accepted submissions will 
be presented in a poster session in the workshop. To submit your 
abstract, please visit: 
https://openreview.net/group?id=JCoLE/2022/Workshop/ml4evolang