Web Site: https://conceptresearch.github.io/CARLA/carla_workshop/carla_2023

Field(s): Cognitive science, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and computer science.

The Psycholinguistics and Cognition Lab of the Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, will be hosting the 5th edition of the CARLA workshop, to be held on August 23-25 (Wed-Fri), 2023, in Montreal. The workshop will be held in-person, only.

Meeting Description:

"Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Applications" (CARLA) is an international workshop that fosters interdisciplinary exchanges about research on concepts. We invite contributions from all fields within cognitive science, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and computer science.

The workshop is open for research on any aspect of concepts and semantics, with three overarching topics, addressing the following (non-exhaustive) list of questions:

- Representation: What is the nature of semantic/conceptual representation? How are concepts processed in the brain? How do concepts compose to form complex thoughts? How can we formally describe and model concepts?

- Learning: What is the ontology of concepts and how do they develop? How do we learn to categorize objects and events? What kind of cognitive architecture supports concept acquisition and development?

- Applications: How are concepts used in cognitive tasks and in applied cognitive systems, such as applied machine learning in computer vision, decision making, category learning, etc.?

Special session: "Context: Linguistic Structure, Knowledge, and Beliefs":

In addition to the main session, CARLA 2023 will feature a special session on "Context: Linguistic Structure, Knowledge, and Beliefs”. Psychologists, linguists, and philosophers recognize that sentence comprehension depends on numerous factors, including grammatical knowledge, world knowledge, and especially beliefs about the context of the sentence’s utterance. The special session aims to cover a broad range of themes dealing with linguistic context sensitivity, including implicit arguments, unarticulated constituents, enrichment, implicature, impliciture, explicature, hidden indexicals, semantic interpolation, presupposition, and anaphora. We invite contributions from all areas of cognitive (neuro)science and philosophy of language.

Invited Speakers:

Special session: (23. August)

- John Perry [Philosophy, Stanford University]

- Brendan Gillon [Linguistics, McGill University]

Main session: (24-25. August)

- Alex Clarke [Psychology, University of Cambridge]

- Aishwarya Agrawal [Computer Science, Université de Montréal]

- Brendan Johns [Psychology, McGill University]

- Stevan Harnad [Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal]

- Alan Bale [Linguistics, Concordia University]

Submission and Publication: We invite the submission of abstracts via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/cfp/carla2023

Papers should be submitted in PDF format. Please send two attachments: (1) one with title, author(s), affiliation, text, and references; and (2) another with the title and text only (there should be no authorship information). Review of abstracts will be based on the anonymized submissions. Abstracts are limited to 1000 words (up to two pages). Graphs or diagrams can be included in the two-page limit. Authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity to revise the abstract before publication in the abstract booklet.

Talks are expected to be up to 30 minutes, including question period. There will also be one poster session.

The deadline for submissions is July 10th, 2023 (at 11:59 pm, any time zone).

Local Organizers: 

- Roberto G. de Almeida [Psychology, Concordia University]

- Christopher Genovesi [Psychology, Concordia University]

- Tobias Ungerer [Psychology, Concordia University]

- Caitlyn Antal [Psychology, McGill University]

For inquiries: Email: cognition.lab@concordia.ca; Subject line: CARLA2023

This workshop is sponsored by the following Concordia University Departments and Institutes: Department of Psychology, Centre for Cognitive Science and Linguistics, Applied AI Institute, Department of Philosophy, the Department of Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics, the School of Graduate Studies, and the Psycholinguistics and Cognition Lab.