SECOND CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

8th AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy:

"The Significance of Metaphor and Other Figurative Modes of Expression
  and Thought"

A symposium of the Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of
Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB)

    20-22nd April 2015
    University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    The Symposium will occupy up to two days at some point within the
    three days of the Convention.


For more detail, inlcuding the newly-formed Programme Committee:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~gargetad/AISB-CP-2015.html

THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS: 15th January 2015
    ** NB. REVISED SUBMISSION DEADLINE **

(full papers or extended abstracts up to 8 pages, via EasyChair site:
 https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aisbcap8)

NOTE: While submission is by full paper or extended abstract, we
      encourage speculative thought, provisional proposals, and
      provocative question-raising based on careful analysis of issues.


SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW:

Communication and expression in language, pictures, diagrams, gesture,
music etc. is rich with figurative aspects, such as metaphor, metonymy,
hyperbole and irony. People engage in such communication and expression
in a variety of contexts and with a range of effects. Modelling
figurative patterns of communication/expression is a key aim of academic
disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, discourse studies, and
psycholinguistics, and automatically understanding such phenomena is a
long-standing and now expanding endeavour within Artificial
Intelligence. A particularly interesting current area of research is
work on automatically generating as well as understanding metaphor --
both understanding and generation are emerging as important sites for
addressing long-standing problems in linguistics, artificial
intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science more generally. In
addition, some researchers have suggested that metaphor can be an
intrinsic part of thought, not just of external
communication/expression.


DISCUSSION STARTERS

The workshop aims to provide a forum for a range of broader topics
within cognitive science that relate to figurative forms of
communication, such as the following.

-- How philosophical thinking on figurative expression and thought
   can/should be exploited/heeded by relevant AI researchers

-- How computational attempts to model figurative expression can aid
   philosophical thinking about it

-- How the production of figurative expression reflects speakers'
   conceptualisations, goals and commitments

-- How to model/analyse/understand the emotional and evaluative content
   of figurative expression

-- The intersection of issues of figurative expression and issues of
   embodiment, enactivism, cognitive simulation, etc.

-- Whether thought, as opposed to external expression, can be
   metaphorical, ironic, etc., and if so what this amounts to
   (philosophically, computationally, psychologically, ...)

-- How figurative and especially metaphorical thinking might be involved
   in introspection, and therefore be bound up with the nature of
   consciousness

-- Links between figurative thought/expression and the nature of
   creativity

-- Figurative aspects of philosophical theorizing (about any topic),
   especially as uncovered by detailed technical analysis of figuration

-- Figurative aspects of notions of computation ... and even: could the
   notion of computation be irreducibly metaphorical?

To cope with the challenges of a fast-changing area of research, we
would like to make special mention of two highly multidisciplinary and
very recent areas of interest that have opened up, and which we will be
especially interested in hearing about.

-- What are the experiences of researchers, across the already mentioned
   disciplines, who are now working with forms of figurative language
   not so frequently considered (irony, and the like)?

-- What are the experiences of researchers who are now working on the
   emotional/evaluative content of figurative language?

Given how closely related figurative language is to culture, society and
specific forms of communication, there are a range of possible social,
cultural and communication issues that could be addressed during the
workshop, including the following.

-- How does the nature of a society or culture subtly affect a language
   and how do members of the culture process it? 

-- How do cultural and societal differences impede everyday
   communication (e.g. language learning)?

-- What prospects are there for natural language processing technology
   to better handle the effects of cultural and societal differences on
   communication?

-- How might intelligent technology improve social interactions for
   disadvantaged members of society (e.g., the elderly, mentally ill)?

Finally, the workshop is openly interdisciplinary, and we are very much
interested in hearing from researchers across a range of disciplines
involved in efforts to model understanding and generation of
metaphor. Key general questions here include the following.

-- What is the relationship between qualitative and quantitative
   approaches to metaphor understanding and production?  o What is the
   relationship between computational and non-computational approaches
   to metaphor understanding and production?

-- What is the range of work currently being conducted in manually and
   automatically understanding and generating metaphor?

-- What are the possible applications of work on the understanding and
   production of metaphor, manual and automatic?