CALL FOR PAPERS

SECOND INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON MULTIMEDIA PRAGMATICS (MMPrag'19)
March 30, 2019 - San Jose, California
Co-Located with the IEEE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMEDIA INFORMATION PROCESSING AND RETRIEVAL (MIPR'19)
March 28-30, 2019 - San Jose, California

Venue: Crowne Plaza San Jose-Silicon Valley Hotel, 777 Bellew Drive, Milpitas, California 95053, +1 (408) 321-9500

Submission Website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mmprag19
Call for Papers: https://easychair.org/cfp/MMPrag19
Workshop Website: http://mipr.sigappfr.org/19/

====================================IMPORTANT DATES====================================================================

January 25, 2019 - Submissions due
February 1, 2019 - Acceptance notification
February 8, 2019 - Camera-ready papers and author registrations due
March 30, 2019 - Workshop date

====================================DESCRIPTION=========================================================================
Most multimedia objects are spatio-temporal simulacrums of the real world. This supports our view that the next grand challenge
for our community will be understanding and formally modeling the flow of life around us, over many modalities and scales. As
technology advances, the nature of these simulacrums will evolve as well, becoming more detailed and revealing more information
concerning the nature of reality to us.

Currently, IoT is the state-of-the-art organizational approach to construct complex representations of the flow of life around us.
Various, perhaps pervasive, sensors, working collectively, will broadcast to us representations of real events in real-time. It
will be our task to continuously extract the semantics of these representations and possibly react to them by injecting some
response actions into the mix to ensure some desired outcome.

In linguistics, pragmatics studies context and how it affects semantics. Context is usually culturally, socially, and historically
based. For example, pragmatics would encompass a speaker’s intent, body language, and penchant for sarcasm, as well as other signs,
often culturally based, such as the speaker’s type of clothing, which could influence a statement’s meaning. Generic signal/sensor-
based retrieval should also use syntactical, semantic, and pragmatics-based approaches. If we are to understand and model the flow
of life around us, this will be a necessity.

Our community has successfully developed various approaches to decode the syntax and semantics of these artifacts. The development
of techniques that use contextual information is in its infancy, however. With the expansion of the data horizon, through the
ever-increasing use of metadata, we can certainly leverage the semantic representation of all media to a more robust level.

The NLP community has its own set of approaches in semantics and pragmatics. Natural language is certainly an excellent exemplar of
multimedia, and the use of audio and text features has played a part in the development of our field.

After a successful first workshop in Miami, we intend to continue this tradition with the second workshop.

====================================AREAS===============================================================================

Authors are invited to submit regular papers (6 pages), short papers (4 pages), demo papers (4 pages), and extended abstracts (1 page max
for a 5-minute presentation) at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mmprag19.

Cross-cultural contributions are encouraged. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Affective computing
- Annotation techniques for natural language/images/videos/other sensor-based modalities
- Applications to ecology, environmental science, health sciences, social sciences
- Computational semiotics
- Deception detection
- Digital humanities
- Distributional semantics
- Education and Tutoring Systems
- Event modeling, recognition, and understanding
- Gesture modeling, recognition, and understanding
- Human-machine interaction
- Integration of multimodal features
- Machine learning for multimodal interaction
- Multimodal analysis of human behavior
- Multimodal data modeling, dataset development, sensor fusion
- Ontologies
- Semantic-based modeling and retrieval
- Storytelling
- Structured semantic embeddings
- Word, sentence, and feature embeddings - generation, semantic property discovery, corpus dependencies,
sensitivity analysis, retrieval aids

To be included in the IEEE Xplore Library, accepted papers must be registered and presented.


====================================ORGANIZATION========================================================================

Chairs:
R. Chbeir, University of Pau, FR (richard.chbeir@univ-pau.fr)
W. Grosky, University of Michigan-Dearborn, US (wgrosky@umich.edu)

Program Committee:
Wael Abd-Almageed, ISI, USA
Mohamed Abouelenien, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
Rajeev Agrawal, ITL, ERDC, USA
Akiko Aizawa, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Yiannis Aloimonos, University of Maryland, USA
Anya Belz, University of Brighton, UK
Renaldo Bonacin, CTI, Brazil
Fabricio Olivetti de Franca, Federal University of ABC, Brazil
Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, USA
David Hogg, University of Leeds, UK
Ashutosh Jadhav, IBM, USA
Clement Leung, Hong Kong Baptist University, China
Debanjan Mahata, Bloomberg, USA
David Martins, Federal University of ABC, Brazil
Adam Pease, Articulate Software, USA
James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, USA
Terry Ruas, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
Victoria Rubin, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Shin'ichi Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Amit Sheth, Wright State University, USA
Peter Stanchev, Kettering University, USA
Joe Tekli, American University of Lebanon, Lebanon