Call for Participation

LAFLANG. LEARNING, AGENTS AND FORMAL LANGUAGES
http://paams.net/special-sessions/SS11-LAFLang

Special Session at

PAAMS 15 - 13th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
http://www.paams.net

3th-5th June, 2015, Salamanca (Spain)


CO-CHAIRS

Dr. Leonor Becerra-Bonache
Laboratorire Hubert Curien
University of Saint-Etienne
18 Rue du Professeur Benoit Lauras
42000 Saint Etienne (France)
E-mail: leonor.becerra@univ-st-etienne.fr

Dr. M. Dolores Jiménez-López
GRLMC-Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Av. Catalunya, 35,
43002 Tarragona (Spain)
E-mail: mariadolores.jimenez@urv.cat

SCOPE AND TOPICS

The special session we propose here had two previous editions. The first edition was in 2011 as a workshop organized within the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology that was held in Lyon from 22nd to 27th August 2011. In the first edition, ten papers were accepted. The second edition was in 2013 as a Special Session at ICAART 2013: 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence. Since it was a special session, we just accepted seven papers plus a round table. In this second edition, we have as an invited speaker one of the most prestigious researchers in the field of Logic Programming: Verónica Dahl. We were very satisfied with the quality of the presentations and with the discussion generated in those two editions. In fact, the success of LAFLang 2011 and 2013 led us to propose again the organization of this special session. We think that PAAMS Conference fits very well the topic of LAFLang because this special session puts together the two main conference areas: agents and artificial intelligence.

LAFLang focuses on the common space delimited by three main areas: machine learning, agent technologies and formal language theory. The main goal of the special session is to promote interdisciplinarity among people working in such disciplines, boosting the interchange of knowledge and viewpoints between specialists. This interdisciplinary research can provide new models that may improve AI technologies.

Understanding human learning well enough to reproduce aspects of that learning behaviour in a computer system is a worthy scientific goal. One of the less understood learning capacities of humans is their ability to acquire a natural language. In order to better understand natural language acquisition, research in formal models of language learning, within the field of machine learning, has received significant attention. The theory of formal language theory is central to the field of machine learning, since the specific subfield of grammatical inference deals with the process of learning grammars and languages from data.

The theory of formal languages was mainly originated from mathematics and generative linguistics as a tool for modelling and investigating syntax of natural languages, and then it played an important role in the field of computer science. While the first generation of formal languages was based on rewriting, a further development in this area has been the idea of several devices collaborating for achieving a common goal. Formal language theory has taken advantage of the idea of formalizing agent architectures where a hard task is distributed among several task-specific agents. In fact, non-standard formal language models have been proposed as grammatical models of agent systems.

So, the areas of machine learning, agent technologies and formal languages are clearly related. Therefore we are interested in contributions on any interaction between those three research areas.

Topics include (but are not limited to):
* Agent systems modelling
* Grammatical models of agent systems
* Formal models of bio-inspired agent systems
* Theoretical descriptions of languages based on agent systems
* Learning agents: Machine learning and Agent systems
* Applications of learning agents to natural language processing
* Applications of learning agents to human-computer interaction
* Applications of learning agents to language evolution
* Intelligent human-computer interaction

Programme Committee

* Leonor Becerra-Bonache, University of Saint-Etienne, France
* M. Dolores Jiménez-López, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
* Amaury Habrard, University of Saint-Etienne, France 
* Jeffrey Heinz, University of Delaware, USA 
* Adrian Horia Dediu, “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, Romania 
* György Vaszil,University of Debrecen, Hungary 

Submitting Papers

All papers must be formatted according to the Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing Series Springer template, with a maximum length of 8 pages in length, including figures and references for the PAAMS 2015 Special Sessions.

This template can be downloaded here:
o Microsoft Word Format
o Latex Format

All proposed papers must be submitted in electronic form (PDF format) using the PAAMS 2015 conference management system for special sessions.

Review Process

All submitted papers will undergo a thorough review process; each paper will be refered by at least two experts in the field based on relevance, originality, significance, quality and clarity.

Deadlines

* Paper submission deadline: 19th January, 2015
* Notification of acceptance: 23rd February, 2015
* Final version submission: 9th March, 2015
* Conference dates: 3rd -5th June, 2015

Publication

At least one of the authors will be required to register and attend the symposium to present the paper in order to include the paper in the conference proceedings. All accepted papers will be published by Springer Verlag in the Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing series

Grants/Awards

The BISITE research group (http://bisite.usal.es) of the University of Salamanca, organiser of PAAMS 2015, offers 40 grants/awards to facilitate the attendance to doctoral and young doctors both to the event itself (including Workshops and Special Sessions) and to the parallel collocated events.