AREA - Annotation, Recognition and Evaluation of Actions ==========================================
Call for Papers

AREA will take place in conjunction with the 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2018) and is organized as a half-day session with plenary talks, posters and demonstrations. AREA is a SIGSEM-sponsored workshop.

Date: 7 May 2018
Venue: the Phoenix Seagaia Resort
Location: Miyazaki, Japan
http://www.areaworkshop.org/


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION MOTIVATION AND TOPICS
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There has recently been increased interest in modeling actions, as described by natural language expressions and gestures, and as depicted by images and videos. Additionally, action modeling has emerged as an important topic in robotics and HCI.  The goal of this workshop is to gather and discuss advances in research areas in which actions are paramount e.g., virtual embodied agents, robotics, human-computer communication, document design, as well as modeling multimodal human-human interactions involving actions.  Action modeling is an inherently multi-disciplinary area, involving contributions from computational linguistics, AI, semantics, robotics, psychology, and formal logic.

While there has been considerable attention in the community paid to the representation and recognition of events (e.g., the development of ISO-TimeML and associated specifications, and the 4 Workshops on ?EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation?), the goals of this workshop are focused specifically on actions undertaken by embodied agents as opposed to events in the abstract. By concentrating on actions, we hope to attract those researchers working in computational semantics, gesture, dialogue, HCI, robotics, and other areas, in order to develop a community around action as a communicative modality where their work can be communicated and shared. This community will be a venue for the development and evaluation of resources regarding the integration of action recognition and processing in human-computer communication.

We invite submissions on foundational, conceptual, and practical issues involving modeling actions, as described by natural language expressions and gestures, and as depicted by images and videos. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- dynamic models of actions
- formal semantic models of actions
- affordance modeling
- manipulation action modeling
- linking multimodal descriptions and presentations of actions (image, text, icon, video)
- automatic action recognition from text, images, and videos
- communicating and performing actions with robots or avatars for joint tasks
- action language grounding
- evaluation of action models


IMPORTANT DATES
================
Deadline for paper submission: 7 January 2018
Review deadline: 1 February 2018
Notification of acceptance: 11 February 2018
Deadline for camera-ready version: 1 March 2018
Early registration deadline: TBA
Workshop Date: 7 May 2018


SUBMISSION
==========
Three types of submissions are invited:
- Research papers, describing original research; these can be either long (6-8 pages, not including references) or short (3-4 pages, not including references);
- Project notes, describing recent, ongoing or planned projects (2-4 pages including references);
- Demonstration notes, accompanying demonstration of software, tools, or systems (2-4 pages including references).

We will decide whether to have an oral or poster presentation, depending on reviewer suggestions and the overall workshop schedule.

Papers should be in compliance with the style sheet adopted for the LREC Proceedings. The AREA proceedings will be published in the LREC 2018 proceedings.

Papers should be submitted through the START conference manager set up for LREC 2018. When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).


MORE INFORMATION
=================
For more information visit the workshop webpage at: http://www.areaworkshop.org/
Or contact us at: jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu, i.f.van.der.Sluis@rug.nl


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
======================
Jan Alexanderson        DFKI
Yiannis Aloimonos        University of Maryland
Anja Belz            University of Brighton
Johan Bos            University of Groningen
Kirsten Bergmann        Bielefeld University
Harry Bunt            Tilburg University
Simon Dobnik            University of Gothenburg
Eren Erdal Aksoy        Karlsruhe Institut fur Technologie
Kristiina Jokinen        AIRC AIST
Johan Kwisthout        Radboud University Nijmegen
Nikhil Krishnaswamy        Brandeis University
Alex Lascarides        University of Edinburgh
Andy Lucking         Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Siddharth Narayanaswamy    University of Oxford
Paul Piwek             Open University
Matthias Rehm        Aalborg University
Gisela Redeker        University of Groningen
Daniel Sonntag        DFKI
Michael McTear        University of Ulster
Mariet Theune            University of Twente
David Traum            USC Institute for Creative Technologies
Florentin Wörgötte        Georg-August University Göttingen
Luke Zettlemoyer        UW CSE


ORGANIZERS
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James Pustejovsky         Brandeis University
Ielka van de Sluis        University of Groningen