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First CALL FOR PAPERS
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International Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding (SpLU) and Grounded Communication for Robotics (RoboNLP) @ACL 2024 (https://splu-robonlp-2024.github.io/)

Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Date: August 16, 2024

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IMPORTANT DATES
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Important Dates
- Submission Deadline: 17 May 2024 (Anywhere on Earth)
- Notification of Acceptance: 17 June 2024 (Anywhere on Earth)
- Camera Ready Deadline: 1 July 2024 (Anywhere on Earth)
- Workshop Day: 16 August 2024 (co-located with ACL 2024)

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AIM AND SCOPE
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Leveraging the foundation built in the prior workshops SpLU-RoboNLP 2023, SpLU-RoboNLP 2021, SpLU 2020, SpLU-RoboNLP 2019, SpLU 2018, and RoboNLP 2017, we propose the fourth combined workshop on Spatial Language Understanding and Grounded Communication for Robotics. Natural language communication with general-purpose embodied robots has long been a dream inspired by science fiction, and natural language interfaces have the potential to make robots more accessible to a wider range of users. Achieving this goal requires the continuous improvement of and development of new technologies for linking language to perception and action in the physical world. In particular, given the rise of large vision and language generative models, spatial language understanding and natural interactions have become more exciting topics to explore. This joint workshop aims to bring together the perspectives of researchers working on physical robot systems with human users, simulated embodied environments, multimodal interaction, and spatial language understanding to forge collaborations.

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TOPICS OF INTEREST
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We are interested in but not limited to original research in developing computational models, benchmarks, evaluation metrics, analysis, surveys, and position papers on the following topics:

- Deployment of Large Language Models for Situated Dialogue and Language Grounding
- Spatial Reasoning with Large Language Models
- Aligning and Translating Language to Situated Actions
- Evaluation Metrics for Language Grounding and Human-Robot Communication
- Human-Computer Interactions Through Natural or Structural Language
- Instruction Understanding and Spatial Reasoning based on Multimodal Information for Navigation, Articulation, and Manipulation
- Interactive Situated Dialogue for Physical Tasks
- Language-based Game Playing for Grounding
- Spatial Language and Skill Learning via Grounded Dialogue
- (Spatial) Language Generation for Embodied Tasks
- (Spatially-) Grounded Knowledge Representations
- Spatial Reasoning in Image and Video Diffusion Models
- Qualitative Spatial Representations and Neuro-symbolic Modeling
- Utilization and Limitations of Large (Multimodal-)Language Models in Spatial Understanding and Grounded Communication


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INVITED SPEAKERS
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We are open to the nomination of speakers and encourage self-nomination. The speakers are REQUIRED to attend the workshop in person. We aim to gather a diverse set of senior/junior speakers from academia/industry who work on related topics in language, vision and robotics and did not have a chance to speak in the past versions of the workshop.

If you are interested, please email splu-robonlp2024@googlegroups.com and include your tentative topic.

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SUBMISSION AND SELECTION PROCESS
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* Long Papers *
Technical papers: ACL style, 8 pages excluding references

* Short Papers *
Position statements describing previously unpublished work or demos: ACL style, 4 pages excluding references
ACL Style Files (GitHub): https://github.com/acl-org/ACLPUB/tree/master/templates
ACL Style Files (Overview): https://www.overleaf.com/read/crtcwgxzjskr
OpenReview Submission: https://openreview.net/group?id=aclweb.org/ACL/2024/Workshop/SpLU-RoboNLP
Non-Archival Option: ACL workshops are traditionally archival. To allow dual submission of your work to SpLU-RoboNLP 2024 from *ACL Findings and other conferences/journals, we are also including a non-archival track. Space permitting, these submissions will still participate and present their work in the workshop, and will be hosted on the workshop website, but will not be included in the official proceedings. Please apply the ACL format and submit through OpenReview, but indicate that this is a cross-submission (non-archival) at the bottom of the submission form.

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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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Parisa Kordjamshidi, Michigan State University
Malihe Alikhani, Northeastern University
Xin Eric Wang, University of California Santa Cruz
Yue Zhang, Michigan State University
Ziqiao Ma, University of Michigan
Mert Inan, Northeastern University

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ADVISING COMMITTEE
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Raymond J. Mooney, The University of Texas at Austin
Joyce Y. Chai, University of Michigan
Anthony G. Cohn, University of Leeds

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CONTACT
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Feel free to contact the Organizing Committee at splu-robonlp2024@googlegroups.com.