26-27 May 2012
Istanbul, Turkey
2012 Workshop on
Computational Models of Narrative
May 26-27, 2012
(1.5 days)
Lütfi Kirdar Istanbul Exhibition and Congress Centre
Istanbul, Turkey
to be co-located with the
2012 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC'2012)
(note: workshop dates have changed slightly since the first call)
Second CALL FOR PAPERS
Submissions due: February 24, 2012
Workshop Aims. Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to
communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society
in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology
and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear
that, to truly understand and explain human intelligence, beliefs, and
behaviors, we will have to understand why narrative is universal and explain
(or explain away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop series is to
address key, fundamental questions about narrative, using computational
techniques, so to advance our understanding of cognition, culture, and society.
Special Focus: Shared Resources
In addition to fundamental questions, the field has yet to address key needs
with regard to shared resources and corpora that could smooth and hasten the
way forward. The vast majority of work on narrative uses fewer than four
stories to perform their experiments, and rarely re-uses narratives from
previous studies. Because NLP technology cannot yet take us all the way to the
highly-accurate formal representations of language semantics, this implies
significant amounts of repeated work in annotation. The way forward could be
catalyzed by carefully constructed shared resources.
This meeting will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing fundamental
topics and questions regarding narrative. Moreover, the meeting will have a
special focus on the identification, collection, and construction of shared
resources and corpora that facilitate the computational modeling of narrative.
Papers should focus on issues fundamental to computational modeling and
scientific understanding, or issues related to building shared resources to
advance the field. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not
discouraged, but is not required. Illustrative Topics and Questions
What kinds of shared resources are required for the computational study of
narrative?
What content and modalities should be put in a ?Story Bank?? What formal
representations should be used?
What shared resources are available, or how can already-extant resources be
adapted to common needs?
What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts? What is
special that makes something a narrative?
What are the details of the relationship between narrative and common
sense?
How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a "universal" scheme for
encoding episodes?
What impact do the purpose, function, and genre of a narrative have on its
form and content?
What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? How
many possible story lines are there?
Are there systematic differences in the formal properties of narratives
from different cultures?
What are appropriate representations for narrative? What representations
underlie the extraction of narrative schemas?
How should we evaluate computational models of narrative?
Important Dates
February 24, 2012 - Submissions due
March 19, 2012 - Notification of acceptance
April 4, 2012 - Camera-ready versions due
May 26-27, 2012 - Workshop (1.5 days)
Submission Details. Submissions should be made through the workshop's START
paper submission website. Papers may fall into one of three categories: long
papers (8 page limit), short papers (4 page limit), or position papers (2 page
limit). More details on the format will be forthcoming in January, 2012.
Organizing Committee
Mark A. Finlayson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Deniz Yuret, Koc University, Turkey
Floris Bex, University of Dundee, UK
Additional Information. There will be a number of travel grants available to
authors who have papers at the workshop, but would otherwise be unable to
attend because of financial constraints.
In preparation is an arrangement with a noted international journal for a
special issue featuring expanded versions of the best papers from the workshop.
Sponsors.
ONR Global
Office of Naval Research
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Previous Meetings
2010 AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Models of Narrative
2009 MIT Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative