Making Meaning Through Embodied Language Games
Around 1996, the first papers started to appear for a new paradigm to study language and meaning. The paradigm is based on framing processes through which language and meaning can emerge and get coordinated in a community of agents in terms of language games. Language is seen as a complex adaptive system that is undergoing never ending change in order to deal with the needs of its community of users. And meaning is seen as actively constructed, based on relevance in situated embodied interactions. The "Language Game approach" was from the start an interdisciplinary endeavour that grew out and influenced the fields of artificial life, artificial intelligence, linguistics, complex systems science, cognitive science, and philosophy. It generated theoretical models, experiments with robotic agents, complex systems studies, psychological experiments, new grammar formalisms, new machine learning approaches, mathematical proofs, and more. The paradigm has been given new life recently with the rise of large language models and advances in robotics.
This gathering brings together researchers that have been shaping the development of the language game paradigm. We try to understand what the key ideas are, how they have been developing, what open problems remain, where current research is focused on. The gathering is primarily set up as a social event, maximizing interaction and historical reflection. Attendance is open to anyone with attested prior work in the field, including of course also very recent work.
Topics: Naming and Discrimination Games. Embodied language games. Semantic games for specific conceptual domains (color, space, time, etc.). Mathematical foundations of Language Games. Emergent speech systems. Emergent grammar. Open-ended language evolution. Applications (human-robot interaction, information retrieval).
How to Participate
The gathering will be organised through a series of panels on key topics and open discussion. Selection is based on submitting a list of your prior publications on the topic of (embodied) language games in the form of BibTeX citations containing at least: Author, Year, Title, publication, DOI. Ideally also URL of downloadable link. This bibliographic data will be made available to everybody prior to the gathering and continue to be a resource for the field in the future. It is possible but not obligatory to submit a poster with an overview of your work or with new ideas you are working on.
@article{
steels1995self,
author = {Steels, Luc},
year = {1995},
title = {A self-organizing spatial vocabulary},
journal = {Artificial Life},
publisher = {MIT Press},
volume = {2},
number = {3},
pages = {319--332},
doi = {10.1162/artl.1995.2.3.319},
}Submission is through the following form:
Organisation
Organising Committee
- Luc Steels
- Remi van Trijp
- Jérôme Botoko Ekila
- Paul Van Eecke
- Katrien Beuls
Sponsors
