IJCAI-ECAI 2022 | Workshop on Semantic Techniques for Narrative-based Understanding 

This workshop explores how AI systems can employ narratives in the realization of human-centric AI. Human-centric AI focuses on collaborating with humans, enhancing human capabilities, and empowering humans to better achieve their goals. This requires that we complement the reactive intelligence of today's neuro-statistical machine learning with deliberative intelligence based on rich models of the problem situation: computational representations of narratives, elaborate ontologies, fine-grained semantic parsing inspired by cognitive linguistics and construction grammar, reasoning and inference, mental simulation, the consultation of semantic resources such as knowledge graphs and episodic memories of past situations, and a control architecture that can flexibly combine all these knowledge sources to arrive at coherent understanding.

Besides technical contributions to realize the components needed for understanding, the workshop encourages the presentation of benchmarks as well as demonstrations of AI systems in which narrative-based understanding plays a critical role, such as the decoding and execution of actions needed for everyday activities (e.g. to cook a dish from a recipe), the reconstruction of the temporal and causal relations found in documents (e.g. between historical events leading up to a significant political change), or the formulation of `scientific storylines' in knowledge discovery that combine information across different scientific papers to generate hypotheses or compare and validate experimental evidence.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full papers (max 6 pages + references) 
• Poster papers (max 3 pages + references) 
• Demo papers (max 3 pages + references) 

List of Topics

The workshop organizers invite paper submissions on the following topics:

• computational representations of narratives including graphs that capture time, uncertainty, causality, spatial relations, context and bias
• mechanisms for handling inconsistencies, uncertainty, underspecification and ambiguity in narrative construction
• architectures and heuristics for narrative construction combining multiple possibly conflicting or biased knowledge sources
• grounding of narratives in sensory-motor data through pattern recognition
• entity linking and narrative binding between narratives and knowledge graphs
• use of mental simulation to fill in narrative gaps  
• semantic grammars for narrative extraction from text (e.g., tense aspect mood modality systems, determiner systems, frame extractors, etc.)
• pragmatic language features and their use in regulating attention and focus in discourse
• comparison, aggregation, instantiation, abstraction and dynamics of narratives 
• narrative-informed story completion, hypothesis generation and theory construction
• measures to track the quality of narrative understanding and the contribution of different knowledge sources 
• applications of narratives in social media, scientific research, instruction execution and other areas.

We additionally solicit posters about any of the above topics as well as posters that describe benchmarks and data sets that can be used by the community to solve fundamental problems of interest, one example being hypothesis generation in the social sciences or the medical domain. We also solicit posters with demonstrations of technical components or application prototypes that promote the use of narrative-based understanding.  

Committees

Program Committee

• Robert Porzel (University of Bremen, Germany)
• Frank van Harmelen (VU Amsterdam, Netherlands) 
• Remi van Trijp (Sony CSL Paris, France)
• Piek Vossen (VU Amsterdam, Netherlands) 
• Alipio M. Jorge (University of Porto, Portugal) 
• Nancy Chang (University of California at Berkeley, US)

Organizing committee

• Lise Stork (VUA, Netherlands) 
• Katrien Beuls (VUB, Belgium)
• Luc Steels (ICREA, Spain)

Invited Speakers

• Carlo Meghini (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hezUvmAAAAAJ&hl=nl&oi=ao) 
• Hermann Kroll (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=b6k1FcIAAAAJ&hl=en) 

Publication

Accepted papers will be published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)

Venue

The conference will be held at the Messe Wien Exhibition and Congress Center, in Vienna, Austria. 

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to sem4NBU@googlegroups.com