Call for Papers

TBC

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Sciences

Part of ESSLLI 2019 (http://esslli2019.folli.info/)

August 5th - 9th 2019

Riga, Latvia

https://sites.google.com/view/semspace2019/home

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AIMS AND SCOPE

Vector embeddings of word meanings have become a mainstream tool in large scale natural language processing tools. The use of vectors to represent meanings in semantic spaces or feature spaces is also employed in cognitive science. Unrelated to natural language and cognitive science, vectors and vector spaces have been extensively used as models of physical theories and especially the theory of quantum mechanics. Crucial similarities between the vector representations of quantum mechanics and those of natural language are exhibited via bicompact linear logic and compact closed categorical structures in natural language.

Exploiting the common ground provided by vector spaces, the workshop will bring together researchers working at the intersection of NLP, cognitive science, and physics, offering to them an appropriate forum for presenting their uniquely motivated work and ideas. The interplay between these three disciplines will foster theoretically motivated approaches to understanding how meanings of words interact with each other in sentences and discourse via grammatical types, how they are determined by input from the world, and how word and sentence meanings interact logically.

Topics of interests include (but are not restricted to):

Reasoning in semantic spaces

Compositionality in semantic spaces and conceptual spaces

Conceptual spaces in linguistics and natural language processing

Applications of quantum logic in natural language processing and cognitive science

Modelling functional words such as prepositions and relative pronouns in compositional distributional models of meaning

Diagrammatic reasoning for natural language processing and cognitive science

Modelling so-called ‘non-compositional’ phenomena such as metaphor

IMPORTANT DATES:

25th April 2019 17th May 2019: Paper submission

1st June 2019 7th June 2019: Notification to contributors

5th-9th August: Workshop dates

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

Professor Ruth Kempson FBA, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, King's College, London, UK

Dr Sanjaye Ramgoolam, Reader in Theoretical Physics, Queen Mary University of London, UK

SUBMISSIONS:

We invite:

Original contributions (up to 12 pages) of previously unpublished work. Submission of substantial, albeit partial results of work in progress is welcomed.

Extended abstracts (3 pages) of previously published work that is recent and relevant to the workshop. These should include a link to a separately published paper or preprint.

Contributions should be submitted at:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semspace2019

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Bob Coecke, University of Oxford

Peter Gärdenfors, Lund University

Helle Hvid Hansen, Delft University of Technology

Jules Hedges, University of Oxford

Dimitrios Kartsaklis, Apple

Alexander Kurz, University of Leicester

Antonio Lieto, University of Turin, Department of Computer Science

Richard Moot, CNRS (LIRMM) & University of Montpellier

Dusko Pavlovic, University of Hawaii

Emmanuel Pothos, City University London

Matthew Purver, Queen Mary University of London

Giovanni Sileno, University of Amsterdam

Pawel Sobocinski, University of Southampton

Oriol Valentín, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Dominic Widdows, Serendipity Now!

Geraint Wiggins, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Frank Zenker, Lund University

ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE:

Martha Lewis, ILLC, University of Amsterdam

Dan Marsden, University of Oxford

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London