Connected Community Human-Centred AI Workshop on 3-4 October 2024

The EUTOPIA Connected Community Human-Centred AI invites you to the workshop Beyond Words: Theoretical, Experimental, and Computational Approaches to Language, Contexts, and Modalities.

Today, both linguistic research and language technology focus on utterances and words. Even current AI has become nearly synonymous with text generation. However, words are not used in isolation. When we communicate we relate them to our background knowledge and the intent of the interaction - what is the purpose of what we want to say, who our partner is, what has been said before, our perception of the physical and social world around us. Speech is also not the only way to convey information: we interact in writing, multimodal messages, different kinds of textual formats, eye-gaze, gestures and other aspects of our embodiment.

The workshop invites students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, natural language processing, language technology, computer vision, cognitive computing, AI, and related areas interested in questions concerning how language is used in different contexts, with support of different modalities, and how such behaviour can be interpreted and generated by computational models.

Some relevant topics include:

• Contextual language use both in uni-modal and multi-modal interaction
• Relation between language, cognition and interaction

• The role of different modalities in agent interaction

• Learning, knowledge, and their transfer between interactive scenarios

• Inference and reasoning

• Theoretical, experimental and computational models of language, representations, and interaction

• Annotation, formal and probabilistic representations

• Task-related model and knowledge representation

• Application of language technology in different practical tasks and associated ethical questions

Intended participants are researchers, university teachers, masters and PhD students from diverse backgrounds that touch upon the questions related to the development and applications of language technology inspired by linguistic research (computational linguistics, natural language processing, and related fields such as computer vision and social robotics, machine learning, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, etc). 

We foresee a fully hybrid interactive workshop with plenty of time for discussion, complemented with invited talks and presentations of ongoing or completed research. To engage the participation of students and to foster research in the student community we will organise special session on student learning with tutorials on practical research methods and applications. 

Participants are encouraged to submit extended abstracts for research talks and posters presentations as well as other materials that will be shared with others during the workshop.

Date: 3-4 October, 2024

Format: Hybrid. On site at Humanisten, Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science (FLoV), University of Gothenburg, room J303 and online. Register here to receive the Zoom link. 

Further information can be found on the event page.