LACATODA 2021

 
 

ABOUT
Six decades of failure to pass the Turing test by computers leads us to rethink previous approaches, lean towards new technologies and knowledge sources, and combine them with advances in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science. We stress the fact that the age of information explosion and more powerful learning algorithms gives us a whole new spectrum of possibilities for creating an intelligent machine. Many marvelous ideas of the dawn of Artificial Intelligence research faced problems of exceptions and the impossibility of manual input of all needed knowledge, but today we have vast amounts of data from sensors, images and text so that we can rethink classical AI methods and approaches to dialog systems. The increased use of WWW, Internet of Things or knowledge bases, etc. could allow us to determine standard human behaviors, emotions or even moral reasoning according to the Wisdom of Crowds hypothesis. Collective input data could also help to retrieve knowledge about the physical world we live in. By combining Natural Language Processing methods with cognitive architectures and philosophy of mind, we can discover a new range of intelligent systems that understand us, our environment and our feelings. In this context, we see a role for NLP and cognitive approaches to play in developing a new generation of user- friendly, more autonomous but still safe systems that, through interaction with the user and the world, can learn how to reason, behave or speak naturally. We are interested in original papers on systems and ideas for systems that use common sense knowledge and reasoning, affective computing, cognitive methods, learning from broad sets of data and acquiring knowledge, or language and user preferences.

The workshop intends to spark an interdisciplinary discussion on joining forces to return AI to its original, broader and deeper goals which are currently represented by AGI – Artificial General Intelligence. In our opinion, these goals and their challenges are distinctly visible in dialog understanding and generation tasks.

After four successful LaCATODAs associated with Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) and IJCAI 2017/2018/2019/2020 conferences, we will held another workshop under the IJCAI umbrella on August 21-23, 2021 (online).

 

The seventh Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches to Dialog Agents Workshop

LaCATODA 2021 will be held as a workshop of IJCAI 2021, in Montreal, Canada, August 21, 2021. The conference is planned to be an online event.

Registration: LaCATODA 2021 is an integral part of the IJCAI-21, please refer to the main conference site.

WHAT IS LACATODA?
A multidisciplinary workshop for researchers who develop more sophisticated dialog agents and methods for achieving more natural machine-generated conversation or study problems of human communication which are difficult to mimic algorithmically.

Relevant Topics:

- Affective computing
- Agent-based information retrieval
- Attention and focus in dialog processing
- Artificial assistants
- Artificial tutors
- Common sense, knowledge and reasoning - Computational cognition

- Conversational theories
- Daily life dialog systems
- Emotional intelligence simulations
- Ethical reasoning
- Humor processing
- Language acquisition
- Machine learning for / from dialogs
- Text mining for / from dialogs
- Philosophy of interaction / communication
- Preference models
- Unlimited question answering
- User modeling
- Wisdom of Crowds approaches
- World knowledge acquisition
- Systems and approaches combining above topics

Important dates:

Submission: May 10 (EXTENDED)
Notification: May 24

Camera ready: June 24