Natural language research announcements

["Girju, Corina R" <girju AT illinois.edu>]

FYI. (please feel free to distribute)
Roxana
________________________________________
From: Erik Mueller 
[erik AT erikmueller.me]
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2015 5:28 AM
To: Girju, Corina R
Subject: an interesting workshop on knowledge acquisition

Dear Roxana,

I'm organizing a workshop on cognitive knowledge acquisition at
IJCAI 2015 in Buenos Aires that you might be interested in.
The Call for Papers is appended below, and the submission deadline
is April 27, 2015. For more information, see http://cognitum.ws

Please also forward this along to colleagues who may be interested.

Thank you,
Erik

===========================================================================
IJCAI 2015 Workshop on Cognitive Knowledge Acquisition (Cognitum 2015)
Call for Papers
===========================================================================

The first Workshop on Cognitive Knowledge Acquisition (Cognitum
2015) will be held at IJCAI 2015 in July 2015 in Buenos Aires,
Argentina.

Cognitive systems are able to learn and reason in a manner that
facilitates their natural and fruitful interaction with humans.
Ultimately, this interaction aims to extend and enhance human
cognition, not by having cognitive systems operate as subsidiary
workers that solve problems for humans, but by having cognitive
systems act as expert assistants able to collaborate with humans
and provide them with advice in a form compatible with how humans
naturally process and understand information.

Knowledge acquisition is central to the design of such cognitive
systems. Knowledge should be representable in a form understandable
by humans, e.g., as simple arguments represented in high-level
symbolic or statistical expressions. At the same time, the process
of acquisition itself should exhibit characteristics akin to those
of human learning, so that humans can relate to it and be able to
interact with it as advice coming from a knowledgeable colleague.
Thus, we mean "cognitive" in the workshop's title to be interpreted
as characterizing both the form of "knowledge" and the process of
"acquisition".

Unlike the significant body of work on mining the web for facts or
answers to specific questions (e.g., NELL, IBM's Watson system for
Jeopardy!), the workshop's emphasis is on the acquisition of general
inference rules that can be applied by a cognitive system in novel
situations to elaborate what has been sensed with plausible and
useful inferences. Along with computational efficiency, scalability,
autonomy, and formal analysis of the process, key is also the use
of naturalistic algorithms. We are more interested in contributions
that propose acquisition processes that could potentially err more
(when typical humans would also err), but are simple and intuitive,
rather than acquisition processes that employ heavy computational
machinery to improve performance at the expense of psychological
validity.

Since knowledge acquisition cannot proceed independently of other
aspects of cognition, such as perception and reasoning / decision
making, we also welcome contributions on other aspects of cognition,
as long as they are directly tied to knowledge acquisition within
a unified framework. We particularly encourage the demonstration
of (prototype) cognitive systems that implement the proposed
frameworks, and discuss solutions to pragmatic concerns that had
to be addressed.

We welcome ongoing and exciting preliminary work. Topics of interest
include, but are not limited to:

- Formal frameworks for acquiring cognitive knowledge.
- Principled evaluation of acquired cognitive knowledge.
- Psychologically-guided design of the acquisition process.
- Considerations related to scalability and parallelization.
- Active choice among available learning data / resources.
- Representation languages for cognitive knowledge.
- Static versus temporal / causal cognitive knowledge.
- Interaction of acquisition with perception and reasoning.
- Alternative acquisition methods (e.g., crowdsourcing).
- Acquisition from media other than text (e.g., video).
- Architecture and implementation of cognitive systems.
- Real‐world applications that utilize cognitive knowledge.

Important Dates

April 27, 2015: Submission deadline
May 20, 2015: Acceptance notification
May 30, 2015: Final PDF file deadline
July 2015: Cognitum 2015 workshop

Organizers

Loizos Michael, Open University of Cyprus
Erik T. Mueller, IBM Watson Group and IBM Research

Program Committee

David Buchanan, IBM Watson Group and IBM Research
Peter Clark, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Paul Compton, University of New South Wales
James Fan, IBM Watson Group and IBM Research
Jonathan Gordon, University of Southern California/Information Sciences
Institute
Aditya Kalyanpur, IBM Watson Group and IBM Research
Henry Minsky, Nest Labs / Google
Massimo Poesio, University of Essex
Gerald Tesauro, IBM Research

http://cognitum.ws

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