Workshop: Beyond Words

The workshop invites students and researchers in the fields of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, computer science, natural language processing, language technology, computer vision, cognitive computing, AI, and related areas interested in questions concerning how language is used in different contexts, with support of different modalities, and how such behaviour can be interpreted and generated by computational models.

Today, both linguistic research and language technology focus on utterances and words. Even current AI has become nearly synonymous with text generation. However, words are not used in isolation. When we communicate we relate them to our background knowledge and the intent of the interaction - what is the purpose of what we want to say, who our partner is, what has been said before, our perception of the physical and social world around us. Speech is also not the only way to convey information: we interact in writing, multimodal messages, different kinds of textual formats, eye-gaze, gestures and other aspects of our embodiment.

Relevant topics

• Contextual language use both in uni-modal and multi-modal interaction
• Relation between language, cognition and interaction
• The role of different modalities in agent interaction
• Learning, knowledge, and their transfer between interactive scenarios
• Inference and reasoning
• Theoretical, experimental and computational models of language, representations, and interaction
• Annotation, formal and probabilistic representations
• Task-related model and knowledge representation
• Application of language technology in different practical tasks and associated ethical questions

Link to the organiser EUTOPIA Connected Community on Grounding Human-Centred AI on Embodied Multimodal Interaction