Chair: Eric McCready (Osaka University/Aoyama Gakuin University)
Invited Speaker: Makoto Kanazawa (National Institute of Informatics) Chung-Min Lee (Seoul National University)(tentative) Christopher Potts (U. Massachusetts--Amherst)
This workshop is co-sponsored by the Tohoku University 21st Century COE Program in Humanities “Strategic Research and Education Center for an Integrated Approach to Language, Brain and Computation (http://www.lbc21.jp/)” and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
LENS is an annual international workshop focusing on formal semantics and is organized as a satellite of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence conference. This year's workshop, the third LENS, will include a special session on formal pragmatics. In recent years there have been a number of exciting developments in this area. Researchers have applied game-theoretical and utility-theoretic techniques to problems such as Gricean communication and relevance, implicature, and blocking; for instance, new work in multidimensional logic has given insight into conventional implicature; new formal techniques have been applied to discourse structure and coherence. We hope in this year's workshop to bring together researchers in this area.
We invite submissions on any topic in formal semantics and pragmatics, including but in no way limited to the following. We especially welcome submissions that involve data from the languages of Asia.
* Logical aspects of semantic theory and semantically applicable formal systems * Philosophical issues related to natural language semantics * Empirical and theoretical issues in formal semantics proper * Topics in formal pragmatics, including (for instance) - Information structure - Speech acts and denials - Presupposition - Questions and Answers - Discourse structure and coherence - Probabilistic and utility-theoretic methods in formal pragmatics - Game theory in linguistics - Implicature and expressive meaning * Applications of formal semantics to natural language engineering
Submissions:
Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages in length and must be in .pdf format.
Abstracts must be sent in electronic form to: mccready@lang.osaka-u.ac.jp
The proceedings of the workshop will be available at the conference site for registered persons. In addition, selected papers from accepted papers will be published by Springer-Verlag in a volume in the "Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence" series.
Important dates:
Deadline for abstracts: February 15, 2006
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2006
Camera-ready copies of papers (not exceeding 12 pages) for the proceedings, in the LNCS style: April 21st, 2006
2006 Workshop: June 5th-6th, 2006
Scientific committee: Yurie Hara (University of Delaware) Jinung Kim (University of Texas-Austin) Eric McCready (Osaka University) Yasuo Nakayama (Osaka University) Rick Nouwen (Utrecht Institute of Linguistics) Patrizia Paggio (University of Copenhagen) Brian Reese (University of Texas-Austin) Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University) Anders Soegaard (University of Copenhagen) Linton Wang (National Cheng Chung University)
Contact: mccready@lang.osaka-u.ac.jp or mccready@mail.utexas.edu