Event description 

Important dates: 8 Dec to 10 Dec 

The workshop brings together students and researchers from linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, natural language processing (NLP), language technology, computer vision, cognitive computing, AI, philosophy, and related disciplines who are interested in how language is used, processed, and interpreted across diverse contexts and modalities. 

We welcome contributions from participants who are interested in exploring how humans communicate using spoken, written, signed, visual, and multimodal signals—and how these behaviours can be modelled, predicted, and generated by computational systems. This includes work addressing foundational and philosophical questions about the nature of meaning, representation, intentionality, and interpretation; the relationship between linguistic form and conceptual structure; and the extent to which computational models can genuinely capture or approximate human communicative competence as interactive participants. Participants may also engage with issues concerning explanation and transparency in modelling, the epistemic status of data-driven approaches, and the ethical and societal implications of deploying systems that process or generate human-like language and multimodal behaviour.

Our aim is to foster dialogue between theoretical and experimental work in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics to inform practical developments in NLP and AI. In particular, we seek to examine how established theories, empirical findings, and methodological tools from the language sciences can be adapted, extended, or rethought to address the challenges emerging in contemporary computational and AI research. Conversely, we are also interested in how insights from AI and data-driven modelling can inform and inspire new questions in the study of human language and cognition.

By encouraging interdisciplinary exchange, the workshop aims to identify shared problems, develop integrative frameworks, and contribute to a deeper understanding of both human communicative behaviour and the computational systems designed to emulate or support it.

We plan a fully hybrid event to discuss research and funding opportunities in the EUtopia CC's areas of interest and expand our group with new members.

Participants will be invited to present their research, discuss research and funding ideas with each other and coordinate potential future research projects. They will also be invited to contribute to a report, which we hope to be published as a position paper.

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