BINLP 2012 - special session on Brain Inspired Natural Language Processing (BINLP)

special session on Brain Inspired Natural Language Processing (BINLP) to be held within the 2012 International Conference on Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems (BICS), taking place from 11th to 14th July in Shenyang (China).
ABSTRACT
The ability to learn and understand natural language sounds obvious and natural to us but it is actually a daedal and multi-faceted process. The illusion of simplicity comes from the fact that, as each new group of skills matures, we build more layers on top of them and tend to forget about previous layers. Current attempts to perform automatic understanding of human language, e.g., textual entailment and machine reading, still suffer from numerous problems including inconsistencies, synonymy, polysemy, entity duplication and more, as they focus on a pure syntactical analysis of the information reaching the brain. If we want machines to literally understand natural language rather than merely simulating the ability to understand it, we need not only to investigate the synergies among the multi-modal and multi-sensorial data available to the machine, but also to go beyond a content-level analysis of natural language and aim for a concept- and context-level analysis, taking also the inevitably interactions with the environment into account. At the same time, as the natural language processing (NLP) techniques increase in realism and sensibility, more and more advanced evaluation procedures need to be explored and implemented to suitably assess the insightfulness of the developed technologies even in real application scenarios. The main aim of this BICS-12 Special Session is to examine the new frontiers of NLP by proposing brain-inspired techniques in fields such as computational intelligence, knowledge-based systems, multimedia (audio, video, textual) information processing, adaptive and transfer learning, in order to more efficiently extract useful information from human language which could lead to improved machine understanding and sustainable human-machine interfaces.
TOPICS
BINLP aims to provide an international forum for researchers in the field of natural language processing to share information on their latest investigations and their applications both in academic research areas and industrial sectors. The broader context of the Special Session comprehends AI, web mining, information retrieval, speech recognition, and opinion mining. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
? Knowledge-based natural language processing
? Human language summarization and visualization
? Explicit and latent semantic analysis for natural language processing
? Time evolving human language analysis
? Computational linguistics
? Multi-domain natural language processing
? Multi-lingual natural language processing
? Multi-modal (spoken, typed, handwritten) natural language processing
TIMEFRAME
? February 15th, 2012: Due date for Special Session papers
? March 15th, 2012: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
? April 5th, 2012: Camera-ready of accepted papers
? July 11th, 2012: Special Session date
SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers (6-8 pages normally and 10 pages maximum) by the submission deadline through the online submission system. The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review or copyright protected elsewhere and will be presented by an author if accepted. All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the field based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. The authors of accepted papers will have an opportunity to revise their papers and take consideration of the referees’ comments and suggestions. All papers accepted by and presented at BICS 2012 will be published by Springer as multiple volumes of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence which will be indexed by EI and ISTP. Selected papers will be published in special issues of several SCI journals.
ORGANIZERS
? Erik Cambria, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
? Stefano Squartini, Marche Polytechnic University (Italy)
? Amir Hussain, University of Stirling (UK)
? Newton Howard, MIT Media Laboratory (USA)