--CALL FOR PAPERS--

Sixth Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN'15)
Special Focus: Cognitive Systems and Computational Narrative

in association with:
The Third Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS)

May 26-28, 2015
Tech Square Research Building, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/cmn15/

--IMPORTANT DATES--

February 2, 2015. Submission deadline.
March 6, 2015. Notification of acceptance.
March 30, 2015. Final Versions Due.
May 26- May 28, 2015. Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia.
May 29-31, 2015. ACS 2015.

--WORKSHOP AIMS--

Narrative provides a framing structure for understanding, communicating, influencing, and organizing human experience. Systems for its analysis and production are increasingly found embedded in devices and processes, influencing decision-making in venues as diverse as politics, economics, intelligence, and cultural production. In order to appreciate this influence, it is becoming increasingly clear that research must address the technical implementation of narrative systems, the theoretical bases of these frameworks, and our general understanding of narrative at multiple levels: from the psychological and cognitive impact of narratives to our ability to model narrative responses computationally.

Special Focus: Cognitive Systems

This inter-disciplinary workshop will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative. Papers should be relevant to issues fundamental to the computational modeling and scientific understanding of narrative. The workshop will have a special focus on the building cognitive systems that are distinguished by a focus on high-level cognition and decision making, reliance on rich, structured representations, a systems-level perspective, use of heuristics to handle complexity, and incorporation of insights about human thinking, meaning we especially welcome papers relevant to the cognitive aspects of narrative. Regardless of its topic, reported work should provide some sort of insight of use to computational modeling of narratives. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not prohibited, but is not required. We accept both finished research and more tentative exploratory work.


--INVITED SPEAKER--

Janet H. Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA


--ILLUSTRATIVE TOPICS AND QUESTIONS--

- How is narrative knowledge captured and represented?
- How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a universal scheme for encoding episodic information?
- How can we study narrative from a cognitive point of view?
- Can narrative be subsumed by current models of higher-level cognition, or does it require new approaches?
- How do narratives mediate our cognitive experiences, or affect our cognitive abilities?
- What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? How many possible story lines are there?
- Is narrative structure universal, or are there systematic differences in narratives from different cultures?
- What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts?
- How do conceptions and models of spatiality or temporality influence narrative and cognitive systems?
- What are the details of the relationship between narrative and common sense?
- What shared resources are required for the computational study of narrative? What should a “Story Bank” contain?
- What shared resources and tools are available, or how can already-extant resources be adapted to the study of narrative?
- What are appropriate formal or computational representations for narrative?
- How should we evaluate computational and formal models of narrative?
- How can narrative systems be applied to problem-solving?
- What aspects of cross-linguistic work has narrative research neglected?

--ORGANIZERS--

- Mark A. Finlayson (Florida International University, USA)
- Antonio Lieto (University of Turin and ICAR CNR, Italy)
- Ben Miller (Georgia State University, USA)
- Remi Ronfard (Inria, LJK, University of Grenoble, France)