Third International Symposium on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication

at the SAB'06 Conference, 25 Sep. - 1 Oct. 2006, Roma Italy

The symposium proceedings have been published as:
" Symbol Grounding and Beyond ", LNAI Volume 4211 by Springer Verlag (Online version is also available).

Invited Speakers:

Program Chairs:

Scope of Symposium

Language is generally considered as the hallmark of human intelligence. One important way to study why this is the case, is to investigate how linguistic communication has evolved. In the past decade, this research area has received a lot of attention from the scientific community and could be considered as one of the main areas of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. The EELC III workshop will focus on empirical and modelling research on the emergence of symbol grounding and other aspects of linguistic communication in language evolution and language acquisition. The key questions relate to how symbolic communication can emerge from interactions of individuals with their environment, including other individuals, and how such communication can become meaningful to the individual or population. Research methods that are used to study these issues include experimental and observational studies on child language acquisition and animal communication; theoretical and computational modelling; and (robotic) simulations of adaptive behaviour. The workshop aims to provide leading scientists in the interdisciplinary area of language evolution and language acquisition a platform to present their latest results and discuss areas of further research.

Until about 15 years ago, there was very little productive research in the study of language evolution. However, with the increased advancements of computational techniques and other empirical methods, the field of language evolution has grown to become one of the major research areas in cognitive science. While the field is largely interdisciplinary with contributions from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, biology, anthropology, philosophy and computer science, the latter has proven to be among the most influential disciplines. A reason for this is that empirical evidence on language evolution is scarce and computer simulations offer a good testbed for investigating hypotheses. One of the major driving forces for language evolution is often considered to be language acquisition. Language can be transmitted over subsequent generations if individuals can learn language. Moreover, it has been claimed that the stages of children’s language acquisition mirrors the stages of language evolution. So, the current EELC will not only look at studies on the evolution of language, but also at studies on language acquisition.

Although many computer simulations take the emergence of symbol grounding for granted, recently there has been an increase in studies that focus on issues relating to the emergence of grounded communication systems. The EELC III will therefore have 'adaptive approaches to symbol grounding and beyond' as its central theme, though contributions are not limited to this theme.

The EELC Symposium Series

This workshop is the third edition of the successful workshop on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication. The first one was held in 2004 in Kanazawa (Japan) under the auspices of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI) and the second one in Hatfield (United Kingdom) under the auspices of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB). Details of the second EELC are found on http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/˜comqcln/EELC05.html. The Third International Workshop on the Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication will be part of the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior conference. The coincidence with SAB permits a better exchange with other researchers working in the simulation of adaptive behaviour field.

Call for Papers

We invite papers of maximum 12 A4 pages that fit within the scope of the workshop. All papers should be submitted electronically in PDF to paulv 'at' ling.ed.ac.uk and formatted according to the instructions given at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. All submissions will be acknowledged and refereed by the international scientific programme committee.

Author's instructions for the Springer's LNCS/LNAI are described here: author_instructions.pdf. The following style files are available (see the LaTeX2e source file of the author instructions for an example):

The EELC proceedings will be published as a LNCS/LNAI series by Springer. For the final submission source files and a copyright form will be requested.

Registration

Those who wish to participate the EELC-III: Please sign in following the instruction on the SAB'06 registration page. As shown in the SAB'06 Workshops page, this workshop is WS3. Please mark WS3 in the SAB'06 registration form. Registration fee is 205 Euro for those attending only the workshop, and 155 Euro for those also participating in the SAB main conference.

Accommodation can also be arranged through the registration procedure.

Venue

The workshop will be held at the Centro Convegni La Sapienza, via Salaria, 113, Roma. Please note that the abovementioned conference center is NOT the venue of the main conference. For more details, please see the SAB'06 venue page.

Programme

Saturday 30 September 2006

Morning Session

08:30 - 09:00 (Registration)
Invited Speakers
09:00 - 10:00
Luc Steels
Unify and Merge in Fluid Construction Grammar
10:00 - 11:00
Deb Roy
The Human Speechome Project
11:00 - 11:30 (Coffee break)
Presentations
11:30 - 12:10
Zoran Macura & Jonathan Ginzburg
Lexicon Convergence in a Population with and without Metacommunication
12:10 - 12:50
Federico Divina & Paul Vogt
A hybrid model for learning word-meaning mappings
12:50 - 14:00 (Lunch Break)

Afternoon Session

Presentations
14:00 - 14:40
Tiina Lindh-Knuutila, Timo Honkela & Krista Lagus
Simulating Meaning Negotiation using Observational Language Games
14:40 - 15:20
Ryuichi Matoba, Makoto Nakamura & Satoshi Tojo
Utility for Communicability by Profit and Cost of Agreement
15:20 - 16:00
Ryo Taguchi, Kouichi Katsurada & Tsuneo Nitta
Dialog Strategy Acquisition and Its Evaluation for Efficient Learning of Word Meanings by Agents
16:00 - 16:30 (Coffee break)
Presentations
16:30 - 17:10
Simon D. Levy & Simon Kirby
Evolving Distributed Representations for Language with Self-Organizing Maps
17:10 - 17:50
Samarth Swarup, Kiran Lakkaraju,Sylvian R. Ray & Les Gasser
Symbol Grounding through Cumulative Learning

Sunday 1 October 2006

Morning Session

Invited Speakers
09:00 - 10:00
Elena Lieven
How do children develop syntactic representations from what they hear?
10:00 - 11:00
Naoto Iwahashi
Robots that Learn Language: Developmental Approach to Human-Machine Conversations
11:00 - 11:30 (Coffee break)
Presentations
11:30 - 12:10
Kenny Smith, Andrew Smith,Richard A. Blythe & Paul Vogt
Cross-situational learning: a mathematical approach
12:10 - 12:50
Elio Tuci, Christos Ampatzis, Federico Vicentini & Marco Dorigo
Operational aspects of the evolved signalling behaviour in a group of cooperating and communicating robots
12:30 - 13:30 (Lunch Break)

Afternoon Session

Presentations
13:30 - 14:10
Josefina Sierra-Santibáñez
Propositional Logic Syntax Acquisition
14:10 - 14:50
Luc Steels & Pieter Wellens
How grammar emerges to dampen combinatorial search in parsing
15:20 - 16:00
Ryo Taguchi, Masashi Kimura, Shuji Shinohara, Kouichi Katsurada & Tsuneo Nitta
Implementation of Biases Observed in Children's Language Development into Agents
16:00 - 16:30 (Coffee break)
Invited Speaker
16:30 - 17:30
Peter Gärdenfors
Cooperation, Conceptual Spaces and the Evolution of Semantics
17:30 - 18:00 Discussion and closing

Important Dates

International Scientific Programme Committee

last modified: 10/5/2006 GMT