Commonsense-2017: Second Call for Papers

[Miller, Rob]

Thirteenth International Symposium on Commonsense Reasoning (Commonsense-2017): Second Call for Papers
 
We invite submissions to Commonsense-2017, to be held in London at University College London, November 6-8, 2017.
 
Endowing computers with common sense is one of the major long-term goals of Artificial Intelligence research. Commonsense knowledge and reasoning are relevant for many applications of current interest. Examples include robot and human collaboration, transparent machine-learning systems that can explain their conclusions, social media and story understanding software, and dialogue systems. The recent resurgence of interest in commonsense reasoning reflects a wider societal reaction to current technological advances, such as the fact that “next year a law will come into operation in [EU] member states which gives everyone a right to an explanation of any decision affecting them that has been reached algorithmically” [Guardian newspaper, 14 April 2017].
 
Approaches to acquiring commonsense knowledge and performing commonsense reasoning may incorporate semantics-based representation and inference, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and/or cognitive science. The symposium aims to encourage cross-fertilization between these and other techniques. The synthesis of multiple approaches is challenging, but could jump-start progress on many outstanding problems of commonsense reasoning.

We welcome a wide variety of submissions, including formal results, experimental results, demos, surveys,  evaluations and comparisons of different approaches, and papers on methodological issues. While mathematical logic has traditionally been the primary lingua franca of the Symposium, we welcome all relevant and rigorous approaches to automating commonsense knowledge and reasoning. 
 
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
 
* Semantics-based representations for specific commonsense domains, such as:
 - Time, change, action, causality
 - Commonsense physical and spatial reasoning
 - Legal, biological, medical, and other scientific reasoning incorporating elements of common sense
 - Mental states such as beliefs, intentions, and emotions
 - Social activities and relationships

* Inference methods for commonsense reasoning, such as:
 - Logic programming
 - Probabilistic, heuristic, and approximate reasoning
 - Nonmonotonic reasoning, belief revision and argumentation
 - Abductive and inductive reasoning
 - Textual Entailment
 
* Methods for creating commonsense knowledge bases, such as:
 - Statistical and corpus-based techniques, including both traditional machine learning and deep learning
 - Crowdsourcing
 - Hand-crafting domain theories
 - Hybrid methods

* Applications of commonsense reasoning,  especially interdisciplinary research in the following areas:
 - Natural language understanding (understanding discourse, question answering, semantic parsing)
 - Image understanding
 - Cognitive robotics and planning
 - Web-based applications (search, internet of things)
 - Support technologies (computer-aided instruction, home automation)

* Discussions of the science of commonsense reasoning research, including:
 - Meta-theorems about commonsense theories and techniques
 - Relation to other fields, such as philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, game theory, and economics
 - Challenge problem sets and benchmarking
 
By default accepted papers will be published shortly after the symposium in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series. Authors may however opt out of publishing in CEUR, e.g. if they wish to publish their paper at another venue. All accepted papers will be made available on the commonsensereasoning.org website for the duration of the symposium. A special issue of Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, which will include selected and extended papers from Commonsense-2017, is currently planned; journal submissions will be due in winter 2018. 
 
Important Dates
 
 - Submissions due: August 4, 2017
 - Submission notification date: September 8, 2017
 - Camera-ready versions due: September 22, 2017
 - Symposium: November 6-8, 2017

Submissions
 
 - Submissions will be made through EasyChair, at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=commonsense2017
 - Papers are limited to 6 pages, prepared in IJCAI or AAAI format, using Letter or A4 sized paper, plus one additional page for references. 

Review Process

Each paper will receive three blind peer reviews. Selection criteria include novelty, technical accuracy and rigor, significance and generalizability, relevance, and quality of writing.

Invited Speakers

We are happy to announce two invited speakers for Commonsense 2017:
Murray Shanahan, Imperial College London
Sebastian Riedel, University College London

Conference Chairs
 
Andrew S. Gordon, University of Southern California
Rob Miller, University College London
Gyorgy Turan, University of Illinois at Chicago and University of Szeged
 
Program Committee
 
Eyal Amir, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 
Chitta Baral, Arizona State University
Vaishak Belle, University of Edinburgh
Brandon Bennett, University of Leeds
Gábor Berend, University of Szeged
Nicola Bicocchi, Unversity of New Brunswick
Antonis Bikakis, University College London
Bert Bredeweg, University of Amsterdam
Erik Cambria, Nanyang Technological University
Cun-Gen Cao, Chinese Academy of Sciences 
Nathanael Chambers, United States Naval Academy
William Cohen, Carnegie Mellon University
Tony Cohn, University of Leeds 
Ernest Davis, New York University
Gerard de Melo, Rutgers University
Valeria De Paiva, University of Birmingham
Luke Dickens, University College London
Esra Erdem, Sabanci University
Nina Gierasimczuk, Technical University of Denmark
Andrew Gordon, University of Southern California
Jonathan Gordon, USC Information Sciences Institute
Catherine Havasi, Luminoso Technologies
Jose Hernandez-Orallo, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia
Jeff Horty, University of Maryland 
Daniela Inclezan, Miami University
Naoya Inoue, Tohoku University
Benjamin Johnston, University of Technology Sydney
Antonis Kakas, University of Cyprus
Gerhard Lakemeyer, RWTH Aachen University
Henry Lieberman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Vladimir Lifschitz, University of Texas
Fangzhen Lin, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Quan Liu, University of Science and Technology of China
Loizos Michael, Open University of Cyprus
Niloofar Montazeri, University of California Riverside 
Leora Morgenstern, Leidos
Charlie Ortiz, Nuance Communications
Sebastian Pado, Stuttgart University
Theodore Patkos, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH
Pavlos Peppas, University of Patras
Dimitris Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH
Alan Ritter, Ohio State University
Chiaki Sakama, Wakayama University
Steven Schockaert, Cardiff University
Bob Sloan, University of Illinois at Chicago
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
Michael Thielscher, University of New South Wales
Lucy Vanderwende, Microsoft Research
Laure Vieu, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse
Stefan Woltran, Technische Universität Wien
 
Website: http://commonsensereasoning.org