[CfP] Machine Learning and the Evolution of Language: Building a bridge between communities
Florian STRUB
We are pleased to announce the workshop “Machine Learning and the Evolution of Language: Building a bridge between communities”, which will be held at the Joint Conference on Language Evolution 2022 (Japan and online, September 5th - 8th, 2022). The workshop will take place on September 5th, 2022 over two sessions (morning and afternoon, Japan time).
The goal of this workshop is to build a bridge between the language evolution community and the machine learning community. The workshop will feature presentations from invited speakers and a lively panel discussion on the advantages and pitfalls of using emergent communication with deep learning models as well as more classic agent-based computational models. For more information on the schedule and the list of invited speakers, please visit: https://ml4evolang.github.io/
To further expand this rich program, we invite the submission of abstracts to be presented as posters in the workshop.
In the past three decades, numerous studies have attempted to mimic the evolution of language with human participants and agent-based computational models. Meanwhile, in the last decade, the machine learning community has similarly made exciting strides in simulating emergent communication with deep and reinforcement learning methods.
Although both areas of research have similar interests and work on similar questions, there has been little crosstalk between them so far. This is unfortunate, since the progress in machine learning and other areas of AI may allow language evolution researchers to model phenomena that they could not model before. At the same time, theoretical and experimental knowledge of language evolution coming from the linguistics community may help focus models of emergent communication used by the machine learning community.
The goal of this workshop is therefore to relate these two areas by bringing together researchers from both backgrounds, establishing common ground, bootstrapping a mutual dialogue between them, and discussing the potential pitfalls of incorporating machine learning methods in the study of language evolution.
We welcome submissions of abstracts of up to 300 words on the basis of new, in-progress, or already published work whose content is relevant to the topics of the workshop, including but not limited to:
- Machine learning methods for understanding language evolution
- Emergent communication with reinforcement learning
- Agent-based modeling of language evolution
Deadline for submission is June 25, 2022. Accepted submissions will be presented in a poster session in the workshop. To submit your abstract, please visit: https://openreview.net/group?id=JCoLE/2022/Workshop/ml4evolang
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