Pros&Comps: ESSLLI Workshop announcement and call for abstracts

We are happy to announce the workshop: "Procedural and computational models
of semantic and pragmatic processes" organized at the European Summer
School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) 2023. We would greatly
appreciate your help in sharing this call for abstracts with potentially
interested researchers!

Location: University of Ljubljana, Slovenia



Dates: 31 July – 4 August 2023



Submission deadline: 5 May 2023



Webpage: https://prosandcomps.github.io



Contact: [email protected]



Workshop description:



Computational methods in semantics and pragmatics have recently gained in
merit and popularity. One of the reasons for increased interest in modeling
is its usefulness in operationalizing abstract predictions of formal
semantics and pragmatics theories and linking them with experimental data,
yielding not only a good fit to empirical data but also insights of
theoretical relevance. Different modeling frameworks have been proposed to
explain various aspects of linguistic data. On the one hand, some
computational models propose domain-general, unified computational-level
(in the sense of Marr, 1982) characterizations of meaning-related processes
in order to rationalize how speakers and listeners utilize language in
communication. On the other hand, procedural models describe language
processing as the execution of series of steps that speakers and listeners
carry out during language processing to compute utterance meanings. Both of
these approaches have specific strengths and weaknesses but they also have
the potential to complement each other.



In the field of experimental pragmatics, information theoretical and
Bayesian models received much attention as they excel in capturing the
dynamic interactions between speakers and listeners. Iterated response
models (such as RSA, Frank & Goodman, 2012; or Franke, 2009), in
particular, are able to explain linguistic phenomena at the
semantics-pragmatics interface (e.g., scalar implicature computation), or
effects of discourse and sociolinguistic factors (e.g., Questions Under
Discussion or politeness; see Scontras, Tessler, & Franke, 2018, for
review). These models provide an abstract explanation of how humans compute
meaning but leave unspecified how this computation unfolds over time.



Procedural models, by contrast, zoom in on the algorithms (in the sense of
Marr’s, 1982, second level) underlying meaning computation and propose
sequences of processing steps, potentially executed via different modules.
For example, in the domain of experimental semantics, procedural models
(e.g. Szymanik, 2016; Bott, Schlotterbeck & Klein, 2019) were applied to
quantifier interpretation and cognitive architectures such as ACT-R
(Anderson, 2007) can capture a broad range of complex linguistic processes
(Brasoveanu & Dotlacil, 2019).



Call for abstracts:



The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers applying
different modeling methodologies. We invite submissions that present
state-of-the-art applications of computational and procedural models or
discuss strengths and limitations of each of the mentioned methodologies.
Moreover, because we see great potential for integrated computational and
procedural models, we strongly encourage submissions that propose hybrid
approaches. Such hybrid approaches may, for example, include sequential
sampling decision models (e.g. Schlotterbeck et al., 2020; Ramotowska et
al., 2023) or models of incremental interpretation (e.g. Cohn-Gorden et
al., 2019; Waldon & Degen, 2021) as procedural extensions of Bayesian
approaches.



Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):



-procedural and/or computational models of incremental interpretation,

-procedural and/or computational models of language comprehension and
production,

-procedural and/or computational models of verification or inferences,

-behavioral and neurocognitive procedural and/or computational models,

-procedural and/or computational models of the semantics-pragmatics
interface,

-procedural and/or computational models of context effects (e.g.,
politeness, conversation goals, informativeness) on interpretation, and

-procedural and/or computational models of interaction between
language-specific and domain-general interpretation mechanisms.



Submissions guidelines:



Abstracts should be anonymous and not exceed 2 pages (plus one extra page
for figures, tables, glosses, references, etc.) with 11 pt font size.
Submissions
can be made at the workshop’s EasyChair site:

 https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=texmod2020



Submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members.



Invited speakers:

Bob van Tiel (Radboud University Nijmegen)

tba



Organizers:

Sonia Ramotowska (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

Fabian Schlotterbeck (University of Tuebingen)
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