Second CFP: 8th AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy (Metaphor), April 2015, Kent, UK

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Papers
Location: 
University of Kent
Monday, 20 April 2015 to Wednesday, 22 April 2015
Country: 
United Kingdom
City: 
Canterbury
Contact: 
Dr. Andrew Gargett (University of Birmingham)
Professor John Barnden (University of Birmingham)
Submission Deadline: 
Thursday, 15 January 2015

8th AISB Symposium on Computing and Philosophy:

"The Significance of Metaphor and Other Figurative Modes of Expression
and Thought"

A symposium of the Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of
Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB)

20-22nd April 2015
University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

The Symposium will occupy up to two days at some point within the
three days of the Convention.

For more detail, inlcuding the newly-formed Programme Committee:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~gargetad/AISB-CP-2015.html

THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS: 15th January 2015
** NB. REVISED SUBMISSION DEADLINE **

(full papers or extended abstracts up to 8 pages, via EasyChair site:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aisbcap8)

NOTE: While submission is by full paper or extended abstract, we
encourage speculative thought, provisional proposals, and
provocative question-raising based on careful analysis of issues.

SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW:

Communication and expression in language, pictures, diagrams, gesture,
music etc. is rich with figurative aspects, such as metaphor, metonymy,
hyperbole and irony. People engage in such communication and expression
in a variety of contexts and with a range of effects. Modelling
figurative patterns of communication/expression is a key aim of academic
disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, discourse studies, and
psycholinguistics, and automatically understanding such phenomena is a
long-standing and now expanding endeavour within Artificial
Intelligence. A particularly interesting current area of research is
work on automatically generating as well as understanding metaphor --
both understanding and generation are emerging as important sites for
addressing long-standing problems in linguistics, artificial
intelligence, philosophy, and cognitive science more generally. In
addition, some researchers have suggested that metaphor can be an
intrinsic part of thought, not just of external
communication/expression.

DISCUSSION STARTERS

The workshop aims to provide a forum for a range of broader topics
within cognitive science that relate to figurative forms of
communication, such as the following.

-- How philosophical thinking on figurative expression and thought
can/should be exploited/heeded by relevant AI researchers

-- How computational attempts to model figurative expression can aid
philosophical thinking about it

-- How the production of figurative expression reflects speakers'
conceptualisations, goals and commitments

-- How to model/analyse/understand the emotional and evaluative content
of figurative expression

-- The intersection of issues of figurative expression and issues of
embodiment, enactivism, cognitive simulation, etc.

-- Whether thought, as opposed to external expression, can be
metaphorical, ironic, etc., and if so what this amounts to
(philosophically, computationally, psychologically, ...)

-- How figurative and especially metaphorical thinking might be involved
in introspection, and therefore be bound up with the nature of
consciousness

-- Links between figurative thought/expression and the nature of
creativity

-- Figurative aspects of philosophical theorizing (about any topic),
especially as uncovered by detailed technical analysis of figuration

-- Figurative aspects of notions of computation ... and even: could the
notion of computation be irreducibly metaphorical?

To cope with the challenges of a fast-changing area of research, we
would like to make special mention of two highly multidisciplinary and
very recent areas of interest that have opened up, and which we will be
especially interested in hearing about.

-- What are the experiences of researchers, across the already mentioned
disciplines, who are now working with forms of figurative language
not so frequently considered (irony, and the like)?

-- What are the experiences of researchers who are now working on the
emotional/evaluative content of figurative language?

Given how closely related figurative language is to culture, society and
specific forms of communication, there are a range of possible social,
cultural and communication issues that could be addressed during the
workshop, including the following.

-- How does the nature of a society or culture subtly affect a language
and how do members of the culture process it?

-- How do cultural and societal differences impede everyday
communication (e.g. language learning)?

-- What prospects are there for natural language processing technology
to better handle the effects of cultural and societal differences on
communication?

-- How might intelligent technology improve social interactions for
disadvantaged members of society (e.g., the elderly, mentally ill)?

Finally, the workshop is openly interdisciplinary, and we are very much
interested in hearing from researchers across a range of disciplines
involved in efforts to model understanding and generation of
metaphor. Key general questions here include the following.

-- What is the relationship between qualitative and quantitative
approaches to metaphor understanding and production? o What is the
relationship between computational and non-computational approaches
to metaphor understanding and production?

-- What is the range of work currently being conducted in manually and
automatically understanding and generating metaphor?

-- What are the possible applications of work on the understanding and
production of metaphor, manual and automatic?