Prizes

1. •Best paper prize: Francesca Tria (ISI Foundation, Torino)
   

2. •Best demonstration prize: Myon robot (Manfred Hild)
   

Important Dates

- Submission deadline: 15 May 2011

- Notification of acceptance: 1 June 2011

- Registration: Through the ECAL website

- Workshop: Monday 8 August 2011

Venue

Salon Gulbenkian, Cité Universitaire, Paris (France).

The AAALE workshop (pronounced as “Triple Ale”) will be held at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2011). For more information, see http://www.ecal11.org/

Description of the Workshop

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.

Organizers

1. •Luc Steels (University of Brussels (VUB AI-Lab) and Sony CSL Paris)
   

2. •Tony Belpaeme (University of Plymouth)
   

The AAALE workshop is organized as a satellite workshop of the ECAL 2011 conference in collaboration with the Evolutionary Linguistics Association.

Programme committee

- Andrea Baronchelli (Universitat Politechnica de Catalunya, E)

- Tony Belpaeme (University of Plymouth, UK)

- Angelo Cangelosi (University of Plymouth, UK)

- Joachim de Beule (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, B)

- Bart De Boer (Universiteit Amsterdam, NL)

- Tao Gong (Max Planck Institute Leipzig, D)

- Manfred Hild (Humboldt Universitaet Berlin, D)

- Stefano Nolfi (CNR Roma, I)

- Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (INRIA Bordeaux, F)

- Luc Steels (Sony CSL Paris, F and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, B)

- Remi van Trijp (Sony CSL Paris, F)

1. -Paul Vogt (Universiteit Tilburg, NL)
   

Contact

For further questions, please contact us at aaale@csl.sony.fr