CARLA 2020

The first international workshop “Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application” took place at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University in 2018. Following its great success, we are organizing a second international workshop “Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application” (CARLA) in 2020. We invite the submission of extended abstracts to the workshop for oral or poster presentations.

Time and Venue:

September 22 and September 23, 2020, VIRTUAL, as part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge (BOSK). You can register for free for participation in all BOSK events under the following link: https://summerofknowledge.inf.unibz.it/registration/

IMPORTANT: CARLA 2020 will be conducted as a virtual workshop on the originally planned dates. More information about how to attend will follow.

Invited Talks:

Marianna Bolognesi, University of Bologna, Bologna (Italy): Two dimensions of conceptual representation: concreteness and specificity

Conceptual concreteness and categorical specificity are two continuous variables that allow distinguishing, for example, justice (low concreteness) from banana (high concreteness) and furniture (low specificity) from rocking chair (high specificity). The relation between these two variables is unclear, with some scholars suggesting that they might be highly correlated. Moreover, while cognitive scientists are typically interested in investigating conceptual concreteness and understanding how abstract and concrete concepts are learned, processed and represented in mind, computer scientists and computational linguists are typically interested in the processes of categorical abstraction and thus in the variable hereby called categorical specificity.
In this talk I discuss the relation between the two variables showing empirical data that suggests that the two variables are two distinct dimensions of the general phenomenon called abstraction.

Mattis List, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena (Germany): Representing concepts for the purpose of cross-linguistic language comparison

While it is obvious that words in human languages denote concepts, it is much less obvious how the concepts that words denote can be compared across languages. Since many linguists are very skeptical if a systematic comparison of concepts is possible at all, approaches that use concepts as a tertium comparationis for the purpose of cross-linguistic investigations are rather rare. This is a pity, since the concept-based perspective on language comparison offers many fascinating possibilities that go far beyond the classical enterprise of historical language comparison (which seeks to classify languages with respect to their genetic affiliation). When working with concept-based approaches to cross-linguistic language comparison, the concrete operationalization (or representation) of concepts is of great importance.
In the talk, I will present our recent attempts to operationalize concepts in a rather pragmatic fashion as part of the Concepticon (https://concepticon.clld.org) project, and how we use them for the creation of huge cross-linguistic lexical datasets in the CLICS project (https://clics.clld.org). Apart from discussing the background of the projects, their major goals, and the problems we encounter, I will also illustrate how the cross-linguistic data which we aggregated so far can be used to investigate concrete research questions, focusing on the learning and the application of concepts.

Call for Abstracts:

“Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application” (CARLA) is an international workshop aimed at fostering interdisciplinary exchange about research on concepts. It invites contributions from all fields related to cognitive science, including (but not limited to) linguistics, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, logic, and computer science. Although the workshop is open for research on any aspect of concepts, there exists a set of core topics that are of special interest:

This workshop provides an excellent opportunity to present and discuss ongoing research on concepts. We invite concept researchers from all fields related to cognitive science to submit abstracts to the workshop for oral or poster presentations.

Submission and Publication:

We invite the submission of extended abstracts via until April 30, 2020. We will send out acceptance notifications by May 31, 2020.

The extended abstracts can use up to three pages (including references) and should be uploaded as pdf based on the following template (LaTeX or Word) which is based on Springer’s LNCS style: Download Template

For both submission and publication of the accepted abstracts, we use OpenReview.net: Link

Presentations:

There will be two types of presentations at the workshop:

Registration:

We take part in the general registration procedure of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge. Attending the CARLA workshop is for free, but registration is mandatory to receive the login information for the videoconference. Please register by the end of August (i.e., 31.08.2020) via the official registration site. We will provide the login information to all registered participants about one week before the workshop.

Schedule:

Tuesday, 22.09.2020

09:00 - 09:15: Opening Ceremony
09:15 - 10:15: Invited Talk by Marianna Bolognesi: “Two dimensions of conceptual representation: concreteness and specificity”

10:15 - 10:30: Coffee Break

10:30 - 12:00: Session I (Formal Approaches)

12:00 - 13:00: Lunch Break

13:00 - 14:30: Session II (Neural Approaches)

14:30 - 14:45: Coffee Break

14:45 - 15:30: Session II (Neural Approaches)

15:30 - 16:00: General Discussion

Wednesday, 23.09.2020

09:00 - 09:15: Warm-Up
09:15 - 10:15: Invited Talk by Johann-Mattis List: “Representing concepts for the purpose of cross-linguistic language comparison”

10:15 - 10:30: Coffee Break

10:30 - 12:00: Session III (Interaction)

12:00 - 13:00: Lunch Break

13:00 - 14:30: Session IV (Prototype Approaches)

14:30 - 14:45: Coffee Break

14:45 - 15:15: General Discussion
15:15 - 15:45: Closing Ceremony

Organizers:

Lucas Bechberger, Ulf Krumnack, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, Mingya Liu