Call deadline: 13 January 2012
Event Dates: 13 March 2012
Event Location: Kyoto, Japan
Event URL: http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/call-papers


EVOLANG WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS
http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/workshops

We invite submissions of abstracts to the following four workshops scheduled for the first day of 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG9) to be held 13-16 March, 2012, in Kyoto, Japan:

-Language and Brain
-Emotion and Language
-Animal Communication and Language Evolution
-Constructive Approaches to Language Evolution

Further details and descriptions of these workshops are available here.

In preparing abstracts for submission, please follow the standard EVOLANG stylesheets for 2-page Abstract type submissions. The relevant stylesheets are available here. Please note that the Constructive Approaches to Language Evolution workshop is somewhat flexible and allows submissions of papers between 2-10 pages (These too should be formatted according to the standard EVOLANG stylesheets). 

Abstracts should be submitted directly to the contact address of the relevant workshop listed on the workshop descriptions page. Please note that the Theoretical Linguistics/Biolinguistics workshop is by invitation only and will not be accepting abstracts. The other four workshops will select 4-8 submitted papers for oral presentation. The abstracts of selected talks will not be included in the main conference proceedings, but will be included in a separate workshop booklet distributed to conference participants and made available for download on the conference website.

The conference will be offering limited financial support to help student authors attend the conference to present their own work. This applies equally to students accepted to give presentations as part of the main conference or workshops. Please see the conference website for further details. 

For further details please see the workshop page of the conference website or contact the organizer of the relevant workshop directly. 

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: 13 Jan 2012
Notification: Early February 2012
Workshops: 13 March 2012

Call deadline: 15 May 2011
Event Dates: 8 August 2011
Event Location: Paris, France
Event URL: http://www.fcg-net.org/events/AAALE_2011.html

This workshop brings together researchers that are attempting to simulate the emergence and cultural evolution of communication systems with properties similar to those found in human natural languages. The workshop focuses in particular on experiments that use physically embodied humanoid robots and target communication systems that exhibit grammatical structure and involve rich grounded conceptualizations of the world co-evolving with language. A typical example would be an experiment in which autonomous robots evolve a spatial language to express spatial relations and perspective reversal or an experiment in which a case grammar emerges for expressing the role of participants in events, or an experiment in which a system of determiners arises to refer to sets of objects in the shared context of two situated communicating agents.

Call for Contributions

Contributions are solicited on all aspects of this grand challenge. They should preferably be based on mechanisms that have been effectively implemented and demonstrated to work on real robots. Although aspects of perception and motor control are obviously very relevant to evolve grounded language, the workshop will primarily focus on issues related to conceptualization and grammar, and to models of cultural evolution that are effective for explaining the complexity of human languages. Experiments that simulate or relate to phenomena observed in human language evolution are particularly encouraged. Posters may include robot videos and demonstrations with physical robots are welcome.

More specifically, submissions are solicited on the following topics:

- Systems for conceptualization, grounded in sensori-motor experience
- Co-evolution of category formation and lexicon formation
- Computational formalisms supporting emergent grammar
- Factors driving the cultural emergence of grammatical systems
- Mechanisms for conceptual and linguistic alignment
- Origins and stabilization of language strategies
- Competition and coordination between language strategies
- Autonomous evolution of scripts for language games
- Semiotic dynamics of embodied agents
- Origins of speech systems

These topics should as much as possible be grounded in case studies.