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Workshop on Semantic Spaces at the Intersection of NLP,
Physics and Cognitive Science
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11th June 2016, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland
(co-located with QPL 2016)

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/semspworkshop
General enquiries: slpcs2016@easychair.org
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CALL FOR PAPERS
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Since their introduction in the early 1970s, vector space models of
meaning have evolved into a well-established area of research in Natural
Language Processing (NLP). Their probabilistic nature and ability to
exploit the abundance of large-scale resources such as the Web make them
one of the most useful tools (arguably the most successful (Turney and
Pantel, 2010)) for modeling what we broadly call meaning in language.
The geometry provided by the angular distance between the vectors has
been widely used as a representative of the degree of similarity of
meaning in NLP.

Another field in which vector space models play an important role is
physics, and especially quantum theory. Though seemingly unrelated to
language, intriguing connections have recently been uncovered. Some
examples include models of compositionality in distributional semantics
(Coecke et al. 2010), treatments of logical words in vector space models
(Widdows, 2003), reasoning about the human mental lexicon in cognitive
processes (Bruza et al., 2009), using vectors of queries and documents
in information retrieval (Van Rijsbergen, 2004), and representing the
meaning of words by density operators (Piedeleu et al., 2015). There is
also a long-standing history of vector space models in cognitive science.
Theories of categorization such as those developed by Nosofsky (1986);
Smith, Osherson, Rips, & Keane, (1988), utilise notions of distance
between concepts represented as feature vectors. More recently Gärdenfors
(2004) has developed a model of concepts in which conceptual spaces
provide geometric structures, and information is represented by points,
vectors and regions in vector spaces.

Exploiting the common ground provided by the concept of a vector space,
the workshop aims to 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, how diagrammatic reasoning depicts and
simplifies this interaction, how language models 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
* Applications of quantum logic in natural language processing
* Compositionality in semantic spaces and conceptual spaces
* Links between conceptual spaces and natural language processing
* Modeling functional words such as prepositions and relative pronouns
in compositional distributional models of meaning
* Diagrammatic reasoning for natural language processing

SUBMISSION
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We solicit papers that describe original work. The submitted papers may
consist of up to 8 pages of content (**note the new page limit**) including
references in the EPTCS format (http://style.eptcs.org/). Authors are
invited to submit their papers via EasyChair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slpcs2016

A selection of the accepted papers will be presented orally, and the rest
of them as posters. The proceedings of the workshop will be published as
an EPTCS (Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science) volume.

IMPORTANT DATES
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Paper submission deadline has been extended. All deadlines are at 23:59
Howland Island time (UTC-12).

* Extended paper submission deadline: 29 March 2016
* Reviewing period: 27 March 2016-17 April 2016
* Author notification: 24 April 2016
* Workshop: 11 June 2016

INVITED SPEAKERS
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* Hans Briegel, University of Innsbruck
* Peter Gärdenfors, University of Lund
* Dominic Widdows, Microsoft

REGISTRATION
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Restrigation is now open:

https://www.sites.google.com/site/semspworkshop/registration

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
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* Peter Bruza, Queensland University of Technology
* Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge
* Bob Coecke, University of Oxford
* Liane Gabora, University of British Columbia
* Chris Heunen, University of Edinburgh
* Peter Hines, University of York
* Aleksandra Kislak-Malinowska, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn
* Daniel Marsden, University of Oxford
* Glyn Morrill, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
* Valeria de Paiva, Nuance Communications, Inc
* Stanley Peters, University of Stanford
* Stephen Pulman, University of Oxford
* Matthew Purver, Queen Mary University of London
* Sebastian Riedel, University College London
* Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London
* Frank Zenker, University of Konstanz

ORGANIZATION
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* Dimitrios Kartsaklis, Queen Mary University of London
* Martha Lewis, University of Oxford
* Laura Rimell, University of Cambridge

ADVISORY COMMITTEE
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* Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge
* Bob Coecke, University of Oxford
* Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Queen Mary University of London