We are pleased to announce the inception of a new Symposium on Language Learning for Artificial Agents, to be held as part of the 2019 edition of the annual conference of the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Simulated Behaviour (AISB). The conference will take place at Falmouth University, Cornwall, UK, 16-18 April, 2019.

Our symposium will be a venue for presenting and discussing recent and ongoing work in the various areas related to the development of artificial linguistic agents. At the heart of this event is the topic of grounded language learning and the host of computational techniques that are being explored as approaches to this scientifically and socially significant area of research.

We anticipate an event exploring the boundary between theory and practice, embracing enthusiasm for recent and ongoing progress in the application of computational techniques to linguistic modelling while at the same time welcoming thoughtful analysis of the ramifications – scientific, social, and philosophical – of the advent of linguistic communication between humans and artificial agents. With this in mind, we invite authors from any field to submit academic papers presenting complete or ongoing empirical work, theoretical research, descriptions of datasets, postion papers, and other material relevant to this topic. Subjects of interest include, but are not limited to:

Representation learning
Ontology construction
Construction grammar
Learning language from multimodal data
Multi-lingual approaches to grounded language learning
Deep learning approaches to grounded language learning
Embodied approaches to natural language processing
Modelling non-linguistic components of language learning
Symbol grounding/ungrounding problems
Language games
Embodied conversational agents
Human interactions with artificial agents
Computational models of developmental linguistics
Modelling language on multiple timescales
Evolutionary computational linguistics
Social considerations in developing artificial linguistic agents

Keynote Speaker: Luc Steels
We are very pleased to announce that Luc Steels, Senior Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC) Barcelona, will be giving a keynote lecture as part of the symposium. Luc has been a seminal figure in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Technology over the past four decades. He founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Free University of Brussels in 1983, and since then has been involved in major projects covering the full range of topics at the heart of AI, from expert systems to neural networks and sustainable computing. Of particular relevance to our symposium is his groundbreaking work on evolutionary linguistics, fluid construction grammar, and language-using robots.

Important Dates:
submission deadline – 1 February, 2019
notification – 21 March, 2019
camera-ready final draft – 4 March, 2019
conference – 16-18 April, 2019

Authors may submit short papers of up to four pages or long papers of up to eight pages (page counts excluding references). Please submit papers through our symposium portal:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=l2a2

And keep an eye on our symposium website for any forthcoming updates:

https://l2a2.github.io/symposium

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of our programme committee. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to give a 30 minute (long papers) or 15 minute (short papers) presentation at the symposium. (Please note participating authors will be required to register with the conference.) Papers will be published as part of the proceedings of AISB 2019.

Review will be double-blind, so please avoid including any information which might identify authors in submissions. Submissions should be made according to the AISB style guidelines. LaTeX and Word Templates can be found here (direct link to download):

http://aisb2019.falmouthgamesacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/AISB2019-style.zip

Symposium participants will be able to take part in a range of other symposia and workshops taking place at AISB 2019. For more details on the conference, including information about location, accommodation, and registration, please follow this link:

http://aisb2019.falmouthgamesacademy.com/

See here for a pdf version of this call for papers:

http://l2a2.github.io/cfp-pdf.pdf