Prof. Dr. Jan Christoph Meister
Universität Hamburg
Workshop Aims
Narratives are ubiquitous in human experience. We use them to communicate, convince, explain, and entertain. As far as we know, every society in the world has narratives, which suggests they are rooted in our psychology and serve an important cognitive function. It is becoming increasingly clear that, to truly understand and explain human intelligence, beliefs, and behaviors, we will have to understand why narrative is universal and explain (or explain away) the function it serves. The aim of this workshop series is to address key, fundamental questions about narrative, using computational techniques, so to advance our understanding of cognition, culture, and society.
Special Focus: Shared Resources
In addition to fundamental questions, the field has yet to address key needs with regard to shared resources and corpora that could smooth and hasten the way forward. The vast majority of work on narrative uses fewer than four stories to perform their experiments, and rarely re-uses narratives from previous studies. Because NLP technology cannot yet take us all the way to the highly-accurate formal representations of language semantics, this implies significant amounts of repeated work in annotation. The way forward could be catalyzed by carefully constructed shared resources.
This meeting will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative. Moreover, the meeting will have a special focus on the identification, collection, and construction of shared resources and corpora that facilitate the computational modeling of narrative. Papers should focus on issues fundamental to computational modeling and scientific understanding, or issues related to building shared resources to advance the field. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not discouraged, but is not required.
Illustrative Topics and Questions
- What kinds of shared resources are required for the computational study of narrative?
- What content and modalities should be put in a “Story Bank”? What formal representations should be used?
- What shared resources are available, or how can already-extant resources be adapted to common needs?
- What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts? What is special that makes something a narrative?
- What are the details of the relationship between narrative and common sense?
- How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a "universal" scheme for encoding episodes?
- What impact do the purpose, function, and genre of a narrative have on its form and content?
- What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? How many possible story lines are there?
- Are there systematic differences in the formal properties of narratives from different cultures?
- What are appropriate representations for narrative? What representations underlie the extraction of narrative schemas?
- How should we evaluate computational models of narrative?
Important Dates
February 24, 2012 - Submissions dueMarch 19, 2012 - Notification of acceptanceApril 4, 2012 - Camera-ready versions dueMay 25, 2012 - Dinner for Workshop ParticipantsMay 26-27, 2012 - Workshop (1.5 days)
Logistics
Please arrange for registration and accommodation via the main conference website. The main conference also has travel discounts and visa information on their travel page.
We will be having a dinner for workshop participants on Friday, May 25, 2012. Please make sure to register by the beginning of May so that you will be included in the dinner invitation.
Submission Details
Submissions are no longer being accepted.
Papers should be prepared according to the instructions in the LREC author kit. A link to the paper templates are at the top of that page.
Workshop submissions should be made through the workshop's START paper submission website. Note that this is a different submission site than the main LREC submission site.
Papers may fall into one of three categories: long papers, short papers, or position papers. The aim is for all papers to be presented orally, but, depending on the number and type of submissions and the schedule, some papers may be presented as posters.
- Long Papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, with two (2) additional pages of references. A long paper is appropriate for a substantial research contribution or theory, with a fleshed-out result.
- Short Papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, and two (2) additional pages of references. A short paper is appropriate for a small, focused contribution, a work in progress, a negative result, or an interesting application nugget.
- Position Papers may consist of up to two (2) pages of content, with one (1) additional page of references. A position paper is appropriate for discussion of an interesting new idea, identification of important neglected areas or topics, or an opinion piece.
Please note that there is no separate paper proposal process - this is different from both the LREC submission process and common practice in many fields of the humanities. Authors should submit a fully realized paper by the submission deadline. If you are unsure if your paper topic is relevant or appropriate for the workshop, please contact the workshop chair or another member of the organizing committee to discuss your idea. There is no limit on the number of papers that may be submitted, and papers do not need to be anonymized for blind review.
Organizing Committee
- Mark A. Finlayson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
- Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
- Deniz Yuret, Koç University, Turkey
- Floris Bex, University of Dundee, UK
Program Committee
- Steve Corman, Arizona State University, USA
- Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Hasan Davalcu, Arizona State University, USA
- David Elson, Google, USA
- Matthew Fay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
- Andrew Gordon, Intitute for Creative Technologies, USA
- Benedikt Löwe, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Livia Polanyi, LDM Associates, USA
- Emmett Tomai, University of Texas-Pan American, USA
- Bart Verheij, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
- Patrick Winston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
- R. Michael Young, North Carolina State University, USA
Additional Information
There will be a number of travel grants available to authors who have papers at the workshop, but would otherwise be unable to attend because of financial constraints.
In preparation is an arrangement with a noted international journal for a special issue featuring expanded versions of the best papers from the workshop.
Sponsors
- ONR Global
- Office of Naval Research
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Cognitive Science Society
Previous Meetings
- 2010 AAAI Fall Symposium on Computational Models of Narrative, (report)
- 2009 MIT Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, (report)