_With apologies for cross-posting. Please note final revised deadline of
30 January 2015._
Invitation to submit to:
8TH AISB SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTING AND PHILOSOPHY
at the
2015 Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of
Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB)
Dates & Location of the Convention:
20-22nd April 2015, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom
Website for the Convention:
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/events/2015/AISB2015/index.html [1]
Website for our Symposium:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~gargetad/AISB-CP-2015.html [2]
(The Symposium will occupy up to two days at some point within the
three days of the Convention)
We invite proposals from potential presenters to take part in this
Symposium. Details about submissions are at the end of the description.
SYMPOSIUM TITLE:
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF METAPHOR AND OTHER FIGURATIVE MODES
OF EXPRESSION AND THOUGHT
DESCRIPTION:
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.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
1. How philosophical thinking on figurative expression and thought
can/should be exploited/heeded by relevant AI researchers
2. How computational attempts to model figurative expression can aid
philosophical thinking about it
3. How the production of figurative expression reflects speakers'
conceptualisations, goals and commitments
4. How to model/analyse/understand the emotional and evaluative content
of figurative expression
5. The intersection of issues of figurative expression and issues
of embodiment, enactivism, cognitive simulation, etc.
6. Whether thought, as opposed to external expression, can be
metaphorical, ironic, etc., and if so what this amounts to
(philosophically, computationally, psychologically, ...)
7. How figurative and especially metaphorical thinking might be involved
in introspection, and therefore be bound up with the nature of
consciousness
8. Links between figurative thought/expression and the nature of
creativity
9. Figurative aspects of philosophical theorizing (about any topic),
especially as uncovered by detailed technical analysis of figuration
10. Figurative aspects of notions of computation ... and even: could
the notion of computation be irreducibly metaphorical?
Submissions should be 8 page full papers or extended abstracts received
by 5th January 2015 via our EasyChair pages. Information about this,
and all other aspects of the symposium and conference can be found on
our website: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~gargetad/AISB-CP-2015.html [2]
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.
IMPORTANT DATES
* Deadline for full paper submission for Symposium: 30th January 2015
* Notification of acceptance: 20th February 2015
* AISB Convention 2015: 20--22nd April 2015
SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZERS
Chair: Professor John Barnden (University of Birmingham)
Chair: Dr. Andrew Gargett (University of Birmingham)
Dr. Yasemin J. Erden (St Mary's University)
Professor Mark Bishop (Goldsmiths, University of London)
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
John Barnden (AI; Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
Tony Beavers (Philosophy; Univ. of Evansville, USA)
Mark Bishop (AI; Goldsmiths, Univ. of London, UK)
Yasemin J. Erden (Philosophy; St Mary's Univ., UK)
Jerry Feldman (AI; Intl Computer Science Inst.
& Univ. of California, Berkeley, USA)
Eugen Fischer (Philosophy; Univ. of East Anglia, UK)
Andrew Gargett (AI; Univ. of Birmingham, UK)
Mark Phelan (Philosophy; Lawrence Univ., USA)
Mihaela Popa (Philosophy; Univ. of Barcelona, Spain)
Mark Sprevak (Philosophy; Univ. of Edinburgh, UK)
Tony Veale (AI; Univ. College Dublin, Ireland)
Yorick Wilks (AI; Florida Inst. for Human and Machine
Cognition, USA & Oxford Internet Inst., UK)
FURTHER TOPICS
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?
Links:
------
[1] http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/events/2015/AISB2015/index.html
[2] http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~gargetad/AISB-CP-2015.html
--
Andrew Gargett
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
BIRMINGHAM, B15 2TT
United Kingdom
The Gen-Meta project:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~gargetad/genmeta-index.html
