Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP, Physics, and Cognitive Science (SemSpace2021)
This year we are excited to be (virtually) co-located with IWCS:
14-18 June, 2021
IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper submission: 26 March 2021 6 April 2021
Notification to contributors: 16 Apr 2021 23rd April 2021
Camera Ready: 7 May 2021
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Authors may submit non-anonymized extended abstracts (3 pages) or papers (8 pages)
SemSpace21 papers should be formatted following the common two-column structure as used by ACL. Please use the IWCS specific style-files or the Overleaf template, taken from ACL 2021.
AIMS AND SCOPE
Vector embeddings of word meanings have become a mainstream tool in large scale natural language processing tools. The use of vectors
to represent meanings in semantic spaces or feature spaces is also employed in cognitive science. Unrelated to natural language and cognitive science, vectors and vector spaces have been extensively used as models of physical theories and especially the theory
of quantum mechanics. Crucial similarities between the vector representations of quantum mechanics and those of natural language are exhibited via bicompact linear logic and compact closed categorical structures in natural language. Exploiting the common ground
provided by vector spaces, the proposed workshop will bring together researchers working at the intersection of NLP, cognitive science, and physics, offering to them an appropriate forum for presenting their uniquely motivated work and ideas. The interplay
between these three disciplines will foster theoretically motivated approaches to understanding how meanings of words interact with each other in sentences and discourse via grammatical types, how they are determined by input from the world, and how word and
sentence meanings interact logically.
Topics of interest include (but are not restricted to):
Reasoning in semantic spaces
Compositionality in semantic spaces and conceptual spaces
Conceptual spaces in linguistics and natural language processing
Applications of quantum logic in natural language processing and cognitive science
Modelling functional words such as prepositions and relative pronouns in compositional distributional models of meaning
Diagrammatic reasoning for natural language processing and cognitive science
Modelling so-called ‘non-compositional’ phenomena such as metaphor
SUBMISSIONS:
We welcome two types of submission:
- Archival papers of up to 8 pages should report on complete, original and unpublished research. Accepted papers will be published
in the workshop proceedings and appear in the ACL anthology.
- Extended abstracts (up to 3 pages) may report on work in progress or work that was recently published/accepted at a different
venue. Extended abstracts will not be included in the workshop proceedings.
Both accepted papers and extended abstracts are expected to be presented at the workshop.
Authors must submit non-anonymized extended abstracts or papers by April 6th. Both extended abstracts and papers must be formatted
according to the IWCS guidelines, and must be submitted via softconf (link: https://www.softconf.com/iwcs2021/SemSpace2021/user/). The extended abstracts should not contain an abstract section and may consist of up to 3 pages of content, plus unlimited references. Archival papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited
references. Camera-ready versions of papers will be given one additional page of content so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account.
INVITED SPEAKERS
Ellie Pavlick, Brown University
Haim Dubossarsky, University of Cambridge
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Tai-Danae Bradley, X, the Moonshot Factory
Bob Coecke, Cambridge Quantum Computing
Gemma De Las Cuevas, Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck
Stefano Gogioso, University of Oxford
Peter Gärdenfors, Lund University
Peter Hines, University of York
Antonio Lieto, University of Turin
Dan Marsden, University of Oxford
Michael Moortgat, Utrecht University
Richard Moot, CNRS(LIRMM) & University of Montpellier
Dusko Pavlovic, University of Hawaii
Emmanuel Pothos, City University of London
Matthew Purver, Queen Mary University of London
Pawel Sobocinski, Tallinn University of Technology
Corina Stroessner, Ruhr University Bochum
Dominic Widdows, Serendipity Now!
Gijs Wijnholds, Utrecht University
ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE
Martha Lewis, University of Bristol
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, UCL
Lachlan McPheat, UCL