The Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia) is organizing an international conference “Linguistic Forum 2020: Language and Artificial Intelligence” to be held November 12-14, 2020.
In connection with the current epidemic situation the forum’s Program Committee has decided to extend the deadline for paper abstract submission till May 20, 2020. Also, because it is difficult to foresee the situation of November, the Program Committee has decided to allow for a distance presentation of some conference papers with the help of a telecommunication platform.
The conference is part of a series of annual linguistic forums initiated by the Institute of Linguistics RAS in 2019 each dedicated to a socially important aspect of the science of language. The 2019 forum took as its topic the UN Year of Indigenous Languages.
The aim of the 2020 forum is to foster dialogue among researchers working at the interface of linguistics and artificial intelligence including those engaged in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Developments in AI have been responsible for recent advances in natural language generation and comprehension; they have also expanded the boundaries of these technologies’ applicability. Neural networks and dense embeddings have replaced models based on feature engineering and traditional discrete categories of linguistic analysis. As a result, the boundary between fundamental and applied linguistic research is being eroded. Empirical linguistics is taking on board these new technologies, in part, to enable better modelling of language and documentation of data. AI is also increasingly becoming a part of the everyday life of language users. Can fundamental linguistics currently offer technologically viable ideas or methods? These and similar conceptual and methodological problems will be the focus of the forum.
Among the topics that would be of interest to discuss at the forum, the Program Committee highlights the following:
- Neural networks (and other machine learning methods) and the problems of their interpretability
- Language generation and comprehension: commonalities and differences
- Linguistic diversity and multilingualism as challenges for AI
- Discourse types: modes, genres, and styles
- Textual complexity and coherence
- Language in the context of multimodal communication
- Modelling individual differences in language
- Non-discrete phenomena in language
- Emerging and prospective linguistic technologies
Please submit abstracts on these and any topics related to the overall theme of the forum by May 1 May 20, 2020 to the email address lingforum@iling-ran.ru. Abstracts should by anonymized, including the file name and file properties; in the accompanying message please indicate the paper title, full names of the authors, their affiliations, email addresses and phone numbers. The Program Committee will select the most substantial and relevant papers on the basis of a blind review procedure.
Abstracts should not exceed two pages of text including illustrations and references. Abstracts must be created using either the Word or LaTeX templates that are available on the forum’s web page. Please submit a pdf file of your abstract along with the Word/LaTeX file.
Two modes of presentation are planned at the forum: talks and posters. If you prefer to give a poster presentation, please indicate that in your accompanying message. Those participants who won’t be able to attend the conference in person, will be provided with an option of distance paper presentation by means of a telecommunication platform.
Abstracts of the papers included in the forum program will be published on the forum’s web page.
The Program Committee is considering the possibility of publishing selected full-length papers after the forum.
The working languages of the forum will be English and Russian.
Information on invited speakers will be provided at a later date.
The registration fee will be around 1,500 rubles. The exact fee will be communicated later and will depend on the availability of funding for the forum. For updates please visit the forum’s web page.
Important dates
May 1May 20, 2020 – deadline for the submission of abstracts;June 15June 30, 2020 – decisions on paper acceptance are sent out;- September 1, 2020 – deadline for participants’ registration;
- October 10, 2020 – publication of the preliminary program;
- November 12-14, 2020 – the forum.