AREA - Annotation, Recognition and Evaluation of Actions ==========================================
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

The first AREA workshop 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. AREA includes a keynote by Simon Dobnik (University of Gothenburg).

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


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION MOTIVATION AND TOPICS
=============================================
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.

AREA PROGRAMME
=============================================================
9.00 -   9.15     Introduction
9.15 - 10.00     Keynote: Language, Action, and Perception, Simon Dobnik (University of Gothenburg)
10.00 - 10.10     Discussion
10.10 - 10.30     Action Hierarchy Extraction and its Application, Aliaksandr Huminski, Hao Zhang
10.30 - 11.00     Coffee Break
11.00 - 11.20     Human-Robot Dialogue and Collaboration in Search and Navigation, Claire Bonial, Stephanie Lukin, Ashley Foots, Cassidy Henry, Matthew Marge,Ron Artstein, David Traum, Clare R. Voss
11.20 - 12.30     Poster presentations (see below)
12.30 - 13.00     Road Map Discussion

Posters:
- Laughter and Body Movements as Communicative Actions in Encounters
Kristiina Jokinen, Trung Ngo Trong
- Learning Actions from Events Using Agent Motions
Nikhil Krishnaswamy, Tuan Do, and James Pustejovsky
- Action Identification and Local Equivalence of Action Verbs: the Annotation Framework of the IMAGACT Ontology
Massimo Moneglia, Alessandro Panunzi, Lorenzo Gregori
- Action Categorisation in Multimodal Instructions
Ielka van der Sluis, Renate Vergeer, Gisela Redeker
-VANNOTATOR: a Gesture-driven Annotation Framework for Linguistic and Multimodal Annotation
Christian Spiekermann, Giuseppe Abrami, Alexander Mehler


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
===========
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University
Ielka van de Sluis, University of Groningen