29 Mar - 1 Apr 2010
Leicester, U.K.
-------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS -------------------------------------------------- Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches To Dialog Agents (LaCATODA 2010) http://sig.media.eng.hokudai.ac.jp/AISB10/LaCATODA2010/Home.html At AISB2010 Convention Leicester, UK 29th March – 1st April 2010 The age of information explosion gives us a whole new spectrum of possibilities for creating an intelligent machine. Many marvelous ideas of the dawn of Artificial Intelligence research faced problems of exceptions and the impossibility of manual input of all needed knowledge, but today we have vast amounts of data from sensors and text so that we can rethink classical AI methods and approaches. The increased use of WWW, RFID, Bluetooth, etc. could allow us to determine standard human behaviors, emotions or even moral reasoning according to the Wisdom of Crowds hypothesis. Collective input data could also help to retrieve knowledge about the physical world we live in. By combining Natural Language Processing methods with cognitive approaches, we can discover a new range of intelligent systems that understand us, our environment and our feelings. In this context, we see a role for NLP and cognitive approaches to play in developing a new generation of user-friendly, safe systems that, through interaction with the user and the world, can learn how to reason, behave or speak naturally. We are interested in original papers on systems and ideas for systems that use common sense knowledge and reasoning, affective computing, cognitive methods, learning from broad sets of data and acquiring knowledge, or language and user preferences. The symposium intends to spark an interdisciplinary discussion on joining forces to return AI to its original, broader and deeper goals which are currently represented by AGI – Artificial General Intelligence. TOPICS of interest include but are not limited to (in alphabetical order): - Affective computing - Agent-based information retrieval - Artificial humor - Common sense knowledge and reasoning - Computational cognition - Daily life dialog systems - Emotional intelligence simulation - Ethical reasoning - Language acquisition - NLP text mining techniques - Preference models - Unlimited question answering - User modeling - Wisdom of Crowds approaches - World knowledge acquisition - Systems and approaches combining above topics VENUE The workshop will take place at De Montfort University in Leicester, as part of the AISB 2010 Convention (http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb10/), from March 31st to 1st April, 2010. All participants must be registered for the AISB 2010 Convention and the registration for LaCATODA'10 is included in the convention registration fee. IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: Monday 11th January 2010 Notification of acceptance: Monday 8th February 2010 Deadline for camera-ready submission: Monday 1st March 2010 Symposium date: 29th March - 1st April 2010 LaCATODA’10 will be held on Day 2 (30th March). SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Types of submission: Full and short papers. Full papers will be reviewed in accordance with standard peer review mechanism with a minimum of two reviewers. The full papers are expected to be up to 8 pages. Short papers are extended abstracts of up to 4 pages. One reviewer will review short papers. We invite submissions of high-quality papers describing original research on different approaches to artificial dialog algorithms their implementation, their supporting theories, and their applications. Paper submission: click EasyChair link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lacatoda10 The submission formats/templates to be used will be posted on the AISB site soon: http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb10/AISB2010.html PROGRAM COMMITTEE Aladdin Ayesh, De Montfort University, UK Kenji Araki, Hokkaido University, Japan Haris Dindo, University of Palermo, Italy Pawel Dybala, Hokkaido University, Japan Ben Goertzel, Novamente, USA Yasutomo Kimura, Otaru University of Commerce, Japan Fumito Masui, Kitami Institute fo Technology, Japan Koji Murakami, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan Michal Ptaszynski, Hokkaido University, Japan Marcin Skowron, Austrian Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Austria Masato Tokuhisa, Tottori University, Japan Zygmunt Vetulani, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland SYMPOSIUM CHAIR Rafal Rzepka, Hokkaido University, Japan kabura@media.eng.hokudai.ac.jp TEL: (+81)(11)706-6535 FAX: (+81)(11)709-6277 Language Media Laboratory Research Group of Information Media Science and Technology Division of Media and Network Technologies Graduate School of Information Science and Technology Hokkaido University, Kita-ku Kita 14 Nishi 9, 060-0814 Sapporo, Japan BACKGROUND During the IJCAI 2009 Invited Panel on "AAAI Study on Long-Term AI Futures", top AI researchers presented their thoughts on what kind of problems we need to tackle in the following decades. One dominating motive was to make a machine that is safe and understands human needs. We propose that in order to achieve this goal we must work on systems that combine various skills that lead to a broader and deeper understanding of human behavior, emotions and everyday life. The knowledge needed for this goal is more available than ever. We can easily switch from a "building knowledge for a system" approach to a "building systems for knowledge" approach. For example, the classic dialog system ELIZA was built to use the user’s utterances simply to pretend that it understands the lan guage. More than two decades later, the ALICE system showed that creating a knowledge database for a talking agent increases its conversation skills. However, we know that teaching a machine to talk about anything is very laborious and inefficient. In the era of the Internet it is easier to retrieve knowledge about a given topic and combine it with other elements needed for understanding as goal/plan analysis or reasons/consequences acquisition. Most researchers concentrate on single aspects of these problems, so we decided to gather all interested developers together in order to exchange our ideas and talk about methods for achieving a higher level of more natural and safe intelligence. We would also like to discuss the ethical aspects of systems that are based on uncontrollable data sources as WWW or real life sensory input, which is one of the biggest worries for many researchers and people from outside academia. There are already many cases where researchers of NLP and cognitive approaches attend the same meetings, for example on emotions. People like Ben Goertzel started Artificial General Intelligence conferences two years ago, gathering representatives of various fields with the same goal of broadening the abilities of machines, as singularity is also one of the hottest and most discussed problems of AI. Through our symposium we would like the above-mentioned topics to appeal to an even wider audience by accepting high-quality full papers and exchange new ideas by welcoming short papers.